Missing hard drive...

First a second HD would not be give drive letter 'E:' as IDE drives are given letters in a set sequence and in win9x you cannot change drive letters of fixed drives there could be lots of answers eg Mounted volumes, Logical drives etc, more info would be useful, But as you say the drive was there previously it may well be that a cable has become dislodged between the IDE on motherboard and the HD check this first and make sure that it is recognised on the POST check ( easiest way is put a blankfloppy into the drive then when the computer stops with an error message you should see a grid on screen with the drives listed, You may need to press Esc to get rid of any boot up picture screens. More info is needed for a more complete answer.

Greetings,

Troubleshooting steps should be done in the following order:

1. Reboot the computer, interrupt the boot process (most likely by pressing the delete key) and go into the system BIOS.

2. Go to the area in the BIOS to auto-detect the hard drives (IDE devices). Go ahead and run that auto-detect. There are (4) devices it will attempt to detect - the primary master, primary slave, secondary master and secondary slave. The primary master will be your c-drive. The rest depends on how the drives are connected, but it should detect the second drive as well, then also detect the CD-Rom drive.

3. If it (the BIOS) DOES NOT the second drive, there's a physical problem with the drive - perhaps a cable came loose or the drive did indeed fail. Check the cable first.

4. If the BIOS DOES detect the drive, and Windows98 does not recognize it, it most likely lost the partition (I've seen this happen before). If that's the case, you'll have to repartition and reformat the drive. HOWEVER, a utility program like partition magic might be able to restore a lost partition without losing the files on the disk.

By the way, the E-Drive you remember was the CD-ROM drive (when the D-drive was being detected).

Feel free to e-mail me if you need some clarification or any other questions arise.
I'll be happy to help.

Regards (and good luck),

Maxwell

This is 90% likely a hardware problem.
Usually this occurs when somebody is working on the PC, and disturbs the IDE cable, or pulls on it. This causes one of the wires in the cable to loose contact with the connector.
(It does not take much of a pull, on cheap cables)
This problem can also occur by itself, without help, just from normal corrosion, caused by age.
The E: may be a correct symptom.
I have seen Windows assign floppy drives as E: or F: , when it is confused by a defective cable.
(It is a bug in Windows.)
The BIOS autodetect will most of the time find a bad cable, but not always.
Do not partition the hard drive.
To test the hard drive. Put it in another PC running the same OS version.
There is a very small chance this is a virus (2%), but it is there. I have run into some strange new ones lately, so make sure the other PC has antivirus software on it.
When the hard drive is in the other PC, you can also backup or recover files from it.
Regards, Chris

This is in addition to my question. After asking further questions about what has happened to his system over the past week or so, he failed to mention one major detail. Upon booting, he received the error "CMOS battery failure", and he had to boot up with "Standard CMOS Configuration". That could play a major part in the removal of that drive. I did tell him to go out and buy a new battery to replace the old one... Let's see if that works!!

Thank you once again for everyone's help!!
Best regards,
Krista

Double check your drive physical connections. It's either connected to the same contoller with the other drive (both drives are connected to the same IDE cable or the jumpers of the drives was not setup correctly. The jumper should be setup as master on the bootable drive and slave on the other.

This kind of problem mostly occur because of 2 reasons.

(1)
PROBLEM- The CMOS battery fails. The default configuration is loaded which detects the master harddisk (the c:).
SYMPTOM- Message during startup. "CMOS battery failed defaults loaded" .
remedy--> contact your vendor to replace the CMOS battery and reconfigure the CMOS.

(2)
PROBLEM-A hardware problem can occur. The connector to the hard disk may get loose or damaged or it may happen that the connections on the motherboard gets damaged resulting in non detection of hard disk.
SYMPTOM-During startup one gets a message of non detection of IDE... (something like that).
REMEDY-Contact your vendor.

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