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Win98 Incorrect drive assignment

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12 replies

by ddvorpahl

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Upon installing a 60GB Maxtor Drive on my attached ATA 100 Card, my computer created a drive letter(G)that is inconsistent with my computer (ie made a ghost drive). My Computer sees A,C,D,E,F,G,H,I but says D is not readable/accessible.

I have a 550MHZ IBM clone running Win 98 with 384 MG of ram.

I have A = floppy
C = 10GB Primary Master (on
motherboard)
D = 8GB Primary Slave (drive appears
to be ghosted to "G" drive)(on motherboard)
E = 30GB Primary Master (Maxtor Drive
on ATA Board)
F = 60GB Secondary Master (Maxtor
Drive on ATA Board)
G = 8GB (Primary Slave) was D Drive
before adding extra Maxtor
60GB Drive
H = CD Rom Secondary Master (on
motherboard)
I = CD Read/Writer Secondary Slave
(on motherboard)

Is there a way I can remove the incorrect letter D drive and change G drive back to D drive? I have programs that reference D drive.

I contacted Maxtor & they don't understand what has happened & don't believe it had anything to do with my adding a drive. Since the drive is on an ATA board I tend to agree with them.

When in safe mode, D drive doesn't appear at all.

Please help.

12 replies

by jdieter69

I had the same problem. The way I got it to correct was to remove the ribbon cables from all HDs except the C drive and the reboot the computer. Windows then rebuild the registry and then you can hook all HDs up as before and windows is happy. You can also edit your registry but I donot know which Hkey it is.
Hope ie works for you.

Jay

by csmith

This is a bug in Windows that I have run into several times.
Last week, I got a call for a PC, where Windows had decided that, the floppy was drive F: (I used, restore from tape.)
I have also used the disconnect the cables method, where there was no backup available.
Those Maxtor/Promise UDMA100 cards are good.
I usually plug the CD-ROM and CDR into the second channel on the card, and put all of the Hard drives on lower IDE channels.
(At 550 the MB IDEs should also be UDMA100.)
Swap the IDE cable on the primary (MB) IDE channel. A bad connector can also start this problem.
Regards, Chris

by jminard

Is d: anf G: excately alike? If so then . . .
I know that within Norton Utilities there is a prgram called disk edit in DOS that will let you delete ghost partitions if it comes to that, But you need to make sure that is the correct one or you canlose all your data. . . and it is a last resort type thing. You should try the first two responses first.

by fatherfox

I too had the same problem with my promise ~/66 card when i added an ata100 WD disk. I wound up just disconnecting all the drives and let the system fire up using the addition of one drive at a time as it was wanting to organize the disk order in the order that they we're added over time. Just start with the onboard disks in order, then do the off board disks in the same way. Yes it's the long way around, but if you have the time (or boredom and just want something to do) it actually helps keephte access order get straightened out in the MB bios, then the promise bios, then finally the windows reg. I had to do it this way on this particular box because the bios was somehow overriding all the software fixes i tried. M$, go fig.

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