2 hds win 98 only sees 1 why?

The real question here is whether your bios recognizes both disks at startup.

If so there may be a problem with both disks residing on the same IDE cable. I have run into problems before where older disks did not like to run on the same cable as newer ones. Try making each disk a master on its own cable.

Hmmm... okay. So we have a 4gig hard drive installed as the Master on the Primary IDE channel and a second hard drive is installed as a Slave on the Primary IDE channel. Windows98 is installed on the master hard drive and the slave has some old Windows3.1 files but Windows98 doesn't see the old drive.

I think I would start with checking to see if the slave drive is recognized by the CMOS. If it is not, you will likely need to set up the drive parameters by hand - it may be old enough that it doesn't auto-detect properly. Also, make sure the slave position in the CMOS is not set to NONE.

I suspect that once the CMOS configuration is right, you'll be home free but if not, let us know what you find and maybe someone will have furtherideas from there.

paul

in win 98 go into the device manager and see if have 2 harddrives listed {probably a type 47 or46 and figure which is your main drive[c] and then go in properties of the other drive and set it to removable and then restart and see if it comes up in my computer

You did not specify if this person dual-boots between Win98 and Win3.1. Do not forget that Win3.1 is an OS by itself and it the PC bootup with Win 98, it will never see Win3.1. Whether the Bios can see the second harddrive or not.

Check that your slaved hard drive does not have the partition set as active, The OS will hide the other drive if it also has a active partition, even though the BIOS sees it. If you want to be able to boot from both, use a boot manager program, which changes the active partition prior to OS load.

You haven't given enough information to make a curtain daig. But I would check in the CMOS like the others suggested, to make sure both drives have been detected and correctly defined.(heads, tracks, sectors, ect.). There is another thing to check though. You say that the HDD with win98 is 4 gig. For that to be partitioned as one drive you had to enable LBA when you FDISK. Which means that your 4 gig HDD is FAT32. I know that your win3x is Fat16. These two file systems are incompatible with each other.

You have to configure the BIOS to recognize the drives before Win98 will see them. The previous answer about FAT16 and FAT32 is almost on target. FAT32 drives will not be recognized by NT or 3.1, but Win98 will most certainly recongize a FAT16 drive, even if the OS is installed on a FAT32 drive.

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