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Hard or Soft Drive?

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9 replies

by rayvreyes 1 view

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This has really been bugging me with indecision as to what the situation can do to harm my computing and/or what can be done about it: (found in my System Information of my 667 MHz eMachines with 14 Gb h.d.d., 1.44 Mb f.d.d., 128 Mb SDRAM, CD-R running Windows Me, with EarthLink ISP throuth 56 MKbps V.90 modem) "COMPATIBILITY-MODE PAGING REDUCES OVERALL SYSTEM PERFORMANCE" and also "DRIVE A... DRIVE C using MS-DOS compatibility-mode file system..." The TechSupport people at EarthLink could not answer and the eMachines people want twenty bucks per contact question (or something like that) -- They would not replace the "restore" disk which I mistakenly left in the box when I brought the first eMachines back to Fry's Electronics, San Jose, which gave me a new unit. Please respond ASAP, thank you very much.

9 replies

by rossenjohn

Reinstall windows, but check first your bios settings
- floppy drive swap : disabled
- HD check your settings LBA mode
Good luck

by csmith

The problem is that the BIOS settings for the hard drive are not the same as the original settings that were used to format the hard drive, so Windows is confused, and drops back to DOS mode.
Upgrading to XP will NOT fix the problem.
The hard drive has to be formatted and the OS loaded with the same HD settings in the BIOS.
This may be a factory error, because they use drive imagers.
This error is not a catastrophe.
The only effect is that Hard Drive reads and writes are 16 bit instead of 32 bit. Thus they are slower. The accuracy is not compromised, and the rest of the PC will run at its normal speed.
The floppy drive always is in DOS mode, because the floppy drive controller is not 32 bit.
Regards, Chris

by dcosgrove

Also check the hard disk controllers in the device manager. If the drivers for the primary ide controller and the floppy disk controller are not installed correctly they will run in compatibility mode also. Not having the restore disk is a major set back as the drivers would be located there, but you can probably down load them from the manufacture in a package calle a 4in1 driver.

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