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Win 98 installation

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by maintenance man

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I have a Pentium computer 400 Mhz. I disconnected the hard drive and put another hard drive on it to have it fdisked and formatted. After I reconnected may hard drive the computer will not boot I cannot even get into setup. I took the hard drive outand fdisked and formatted it from anothe computer and put the hard drive back into my Pentium II and when I install the win 98 operating system it makes c: the ram drive and it does not recognize my hard drive at all. I can not even get into setup to try and rectify the problem. The computer is also very slow. Has the BIOS or the motherboard been reconfigured in some way by using my Pentium II to format another hard drive. Please help

11 replies

by maxwell edison

After you install the new hard drive into your computer, you'll have to go into the system BIOS to detect the new drive. The computer has to recognize the drive before Windows can.

1. Install the new hard drive. Make sure the jumpers are set correctly to define that drive as the primary master drive.

2. Turn on the computer and (almost) immediately press the Delete key to enter the system BIOS. (On some computers, there may be a different key/combination of keys to gain access to the BIOS.)

3. In the BIOS you'll find a section to automatically detect the IDE devices. It should be pretty straight forward.

4. Windows should then be able to recognize the drive for its setup.

Good luck

by mstefanus

If your computer will not boot when the hard drive is not connected there is probably some problem with the connection(s) between the hard drive and the hard drive or the jumpers are not properly configured. Check the ribbon cable, is it OK? Try with another cable see if it works. Check also the pins, is pin #1 connected properly. Another item in your checklist is jumper.. is it properly configured? After the system boots properly then you can worry about FDISK and Windows.HTH

by kwduke

When you disconnected your original hd to put another one in to fdisk, some settings in the BIOS may have inadvertently been changed. Now, if I understood you correctly,you have also fdisked your "original" harddrive as well... now you will have to let the BIOS "find" the original harddrive again, because it will be as though it is brand new again (completely erased).
When you turn the computer on.. hit the "del" key or "F2" key or it may even be the "F10 or F8" key to go into setup..try eachof these immediately after starting the computer until you get into setup.... after that... go to the Bios settings page and make sure that the "detect hard drive" is set to automatic. Also make sure that the "boot sequence" is set to A, CDROM, C, or CDROM, A, C,... just so C is last. Save your settings then exit.
Now if you had Win98/95 you must have a bootable floppy to start with.. if you have WIN NT/2000/XP you can put the CD in and restart the computer. If you don't have a bootable floppyemail me and we can go from there.
If you had 1 of the other OS's then after restarting the computer it should detect the cd and start running setup from there.

by meddjay

First of all, can your computer handle the new hard drive, if its a very new hard drive with a very old MB then it may not work without updating the bios etc, and then there is still no guarantee it will work. What kind of bootdisk are you using? Has to be the same as the one you formatted and fdisked with. And like the others said...make sure it is jumpered right.

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