packard bell with 2 hard drives

Have you tried to take out the harddrives and check on their individual capacity. Maybe it is only 1 GB each or the 2.1 GB each. Try to check in your BIOS whether, both of them are enable or only the primary is only enabled. I cannot help you on the 2 drives acting as one virtual drive. if you are out of ideas, go and buy a new harddrives. Make sure your computer can support their capacity.

I have seen this before the two drives that i seen 1 was an 850mb the 1.5 gig together they showed as 2.5 gig the sys will not work with a single drive therefore trying to upgrade the drives to a newer larger drive is out of the ? I would not suggest trying to format until you fdisk them or it if you fdisk them and see them as two seperate drives display the partition info to see what you have on each you may be able to delete the active partition but I would not sugest deleting any others Iknow that the drives will not work apart either if they show up as on drive in fdisk then display part info again delete active partition the format drive and install 98 do not delete any other partions on the drive as they are there to let the system know that they work together

The machine probably is combining the totals of the two drives.

One thing you may want to try is to go to the web site of the HDs maker and look for their setup tool such as Maxtor's MaxBlast, Seagate's Disk Wizard or Quantum's Ontrack Disk Manager. You can use these to fdisk and format your drives in a number of ways. Please read the directions first and make sure you check PB's manuals for possible problems.

Good Luck.

If you've checked the previous suggestions and still have a problem you may want to check your power supply. Is the fan on the PS dirty? Is it spinning properly? Does the PS feel hot? You could also check the voltages. Do this carefully and never open the power supply while it's running! Don't cross any of the contacts. If you don't feel right with this take it to a pro.

These are the voltages you should see on the power connectors with as much as 5% + or -.

Black = Ground
Yellow = +12
Red = +5

If you are not getting these values you'll need to replace the PS. Leave the meter on for a while to see if there are drops in power.

You have more than enough good answers here, but I want to speak my mind.
I'd check the Bios to see if the system sees it as 1 disk. If that is the case, it should be perfectly safe to fdisk it, for DOS is collecting the info from Bios. When you dothe Fdisk make sure you use a Win98 Startup disk to allow you to creater a FAT32 partition.
Now, b4 I risk my computer, I'd give PB a call (your computer should have 3 yrs warranty) and ask them about it.
I got to tell you, it's amazing what companies do to proprietary systems to force you to buy a new computer in stead of upgrading. I know that next time you'll open the box b4 you buy it, won't you?
I tried checking specs for you on PB site, but site was not avail.

Good luck!

With a second Hard drive installed, fdisk should have an options (5 I believe) that'll allow you to switch to another HD for partitioning.

If it shows it there, the first thing I'd look for is some sort of prep utility, like ezdrive or maxblast, specifically for these HDs to set them up as one. I doubt the setup would be entail using something like LBA to set these up.

This may be something already setup for you on a boot sector somewhere on the HD and the only thing you should ahve todo is just format it, even if you do fdisk it.

Obvioulsy a call to PB pay be in order, although what support their offering now is beyond me.

Just a side note, If you do format and want to reisntall something, the only problem is setting up the device drivers for everything else on the machine. Usually if you just get infs from the manufucturer and copy those into a directory on the HD along with the windows cabs and then run setup from there you're fine, but PB has always been hell when trying to do tha

Check BIOS. That is the only way to verify how the machine is looking at hardware. If in BIOS two hard drives appear, then you can fdisk them separately and re-install your operating system. If not, then I would assume that you do have a propietary setup that means you are, in a word - screwed. Sorry! And no, I don't know how to check CMOS in a packard bell. If the drives do appear in BIOS as separate, depending on what type of software is making them act as one, you may have to put them in a different machine to successfully fdisk them. You should be able to then re-install them in your original machine.
- Jason Eberhardt

Howdy! Yes you can fdisk and format as one drive, I've worked on many of these systems, the drives are seen as one drive to the computer.

Bill

Yes, first of all you should check out the CMOS settings (follow the instructions from the other answers to do this). There are two possibilities; the two hard drives are combining their capacities thus resulting a single 2.1 GB hard drive (then youcan format each one separately), or they are forming something specific to high-end servers, called RAID (redundant area of inexpensive disks). This is a back-up mechanism, meaning that the two hard drives contain the same data and if one fails the other one automatically takes over. Your case is not a actually a RAID since, as I said, this a solution used on servers with operating systems such as Win NT or Unix and have more than two hard-drives, but it could be a manufacturer idea inspired from this technology. If this is the case, you can fdisk as if you are working on a single hard drive because the other one will automatically reflect the changes. But, again, I’ve never seen this in my experience. So try fdisk and hope for the best. Also take care t

The simple answer is, yes, you can fdisk these drives as if they were one. You can also fdisk these drives separately if you so choose. There will be a couple jumper settings on both the HDDs, and the motherboard that you will have to change. Seethe owners manuals for information on jumper settings. Also, you may have to connect a second data cable in order to allow each drive it's own IDE interface.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Fortunately and unfortuanately, I have seen this setup in my shop. Without any consistancy, some of the machines with the "dual drive" setup would install windows98 and see them as one drive, but, there was a partition on the drives of a small sizethat seemed to hold the info to keep the drives together. You can do really whatever you want to the drives as long as the little partitions are ok.

Glad to muddle the issue more.

You could try the simple method of booting from a dos/startup disk and formating the drive without fdisking it. This eliminates dealing with one of PB's "creative" situations.

PB went out of buisness as of the end of 1999 and the U.S. support site is hard to get to. I found the Canadian one still works. It's at

http://216.219.192.76/packardbell1/english_packard_bell_canada.htm

You will need the system number to get the information

Good Luck

All these answers over a Cheesy Packard HELL... They were, are and is lame! Throw both DRIVES away...and buy one nice one for 20 bucks. (US DOLLARS)

In short no. I have seen this isue many times the drives should be of equal size. PB used the drives as a cheap alternative (which did not work out well for PB) to buying a 2.1 + size drive as they were expensive and pb was concerned with keeping the cost down. The bios will only see one drive and only one drive is listed in the operating system. The drives will function normally in a completely different machine but they will not function individually in that machine even fdisk will see it as one drive. I don't see why it wont take windows 98 as the merging of the hard drives is transparent to the operating system and fdisk and format software. you should be able to fdisk with fat 32 and format it and install windows 98 just fine.

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