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Phantom Hard Drive in WIN98

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by frankbert 1 view

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I have recently added a Western Digital 40G ATA100 HD to my WIN98 system. This is connected through a Maxtor ATA100 PCI card and is the Primary boot disk for the system. The secondary drive is a WD 10G, which is attached to the other IDE of the card. After re-formatting twice, I still cannot get rid of the "d" drive which reads as FAT (Not FAT32 like my other two drives)and completely full with no space used or left. I tried adding buffers=12,0 and lastdrive=G (my last physical drive +1) tomy system files, but this doesn't appear to help. I can't delete this phantom drive, and it error's out when you try to view it. Also, Norton does a drive image that errors everytime it runs when this drive comes up.

15 replies

by macgyver.hicks

frankbert,
You have not given us the type of computer that you are running. Some "brand name" computers, e.g. Compaq, will create a small partition that carries information and recovery data. How large is the partition in
question? If this is not the case, then you have a couple of options. 1)FDISK and format the physical drive that has the logical partition. (Back-up any necessary data to the other drive.) 2) If you don't mind spending a little extra money, you can get PowerQuest's Partition Magic 6($40-$60). This will allow you to adjust and format the drives and partitions without loss of data. I use it often as I run multiple OS's on my computers. If you choose to run a multi-boot computer as I do, Partition Magic also has a program called Boot Magic that makes multi-boot REAL easy.
I wish you well.

by frankbert

This is a custom built PIII 667 computer with ASUS motherboard SBLIVE! soundcard and TNT2 video card, and 256mb PC133 ram. I tried reformatting twice already with the same results. It appears to be some sort of buffer but doesn't show any space used.

by estebandelatorre

Boot from c: (currently ok) but in dos mode.
At the DOS prompt type FDISK,
When ask to enable large partitions size, choose YES!
Change to disk 2, delete all partitions on this disk, and then re-create a new partition on this disk.
Reboot, StartW98 and format the drive.

Good luck

by macgyver.hicks

If the FDISK didn't work. Have you given consideration to using Partition Magic? It is a very powerful partitioning and formatting program. As well, there is no data loss with this program. If you can, give it a shot. If you are running Win9x or NT, you can use Version 5. If your running WinME or 2000, you will need Version 6.
I wish you well.

by khinton

Your Mainboard does not address the 40g hdd, this will need to be replaced if a BIOS update does not work. Either way once you have replaced/updated you will have to reinstall the HDD using Fdisk and selecting "Y" when asked use entire space for drive

by joeydawop12

Many of the newer ATA/100 mainboards will develop serious conflicts such as yours when combining different brand name HDD. also you may try connecting your WD 10GB directly to an EIDE slot directly on your board as it is ATA/66. your conflict is probably occuring throught he maxtor adapter card.
Good luck and I hope this helps
Joey

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