Windows 98se installation problem

f1charlie

Here's one for you guru's to dredge the dusty area of your brains!

My trusty 98SE machine got to the point where I could get into safe mode, but not boot past the splash screen. I could still see my slave drive at this point.

I had a spare hard drive so I installed a fresh copy of 98SE to that, having disconnected the slave drive, to ensure I didn't overwrite the wrong drive.

With 98SE now installed (but it looks like my graphics card has died, as the fan is not spinning and it is not detect in the system control panel) I reconnected my slave drive. It is detected in the BIOS and in the system control panel, but windows cannot see it, so has not been aloocated a drive letter.

I used fdisk to look at it, and it says the partition is non-DOS. Is this why windows can't see it? Why did it work before, but not now? And can I do something to get windows to see it again without destroying the data on it?

Thanks in advance for any help.

MrQwest

This is probably well wrong, but isn't it something to do with the file systems? Didn't Microsoft bring in the NTFS file system from WinNT (& win2k) onwards?

Im presuming the win98 install is using the FAT32 file system, and as such, the 2 are different.

From reading this post on another forum (sorry admin!), it looks as if running NTFS hard drives on win98 isn't very stable..

As for the graphics card, could it be something to do with the fact it may not be supported by Win98? Therefore, if it's not supported, it may not start?

f1charlie

The system had been running happily (well as happily as windows 98se would ever run!) for years with the same slave drive and graphics card. The only thing I have changed is replacing the original master hard drive with a new one with a fresh windows installation on it.

f1charlie

Ha! Found some threads elsewhere which mentioned the problem may be related to Goback, which I had installed. They suggest that if I reinstall Goback on my master drive, the slave drive will reappear. Something to try later.
It's so much easier googling at 1280x1024 (when I should be working!) then 640x480 or whatever the standard VGA driver is!
Now to try and find a suitable graphics card!