Have an older machine (486?)but won't recognize the hard drive and presents an "Invalid Drive Specification" message. i was able to enter CMOS and it had specifications for the fixed disk but it still doesn't recognize the c drive? Thanks for taking the time

You need to check and drive to see a partition has been assigned to c: Use fdisk and select option #4 to display the drive info. You may need to create a primary partition if one is not seen. Reboot, then format the c:\ using the following syntax. format c: \q \s ..good luck. aaa

You will net all your program disks. this will delete everything from the drive and you must start over. load dos and win3.11 or win95 or win98. then all the programs that you want on it. what did you use the computer for. is it a new drive you want to put in or an old drive that quit? if you fdisk and push f4 and it will not give you any info then the drive may be bad or plugged in wrong. what did you plan on useing computer for now? it will help us help you if we know this . Owen Prince

In old (legacy) systems, higher capacity drives (some above 504 MB & all above 2 GB) on Dos based/Win95a (FAT16) machines show this error, though they are connected/partioned right and have nothing wrong with hard drives. You have to check for enabling LBA (Logical Block Addressing) in your system's BIOS options/or enable LBA through software. Otherwise you may have to upgrade your BIOS either through software i.e. Flash Ram or replacing the ROM chip depending on your BIOS manufacturer/year of make. If your hard-drive is above 2GB then either partition them under 2.1 GB or install WIN 95b (OSR2)/Win98. It's a same situation as in Dos 3.3 we have to make less than 32 MB partition other-wise it won't see above 32MB. Good luck. P.S. Even in updated systems i.e. Pentium systems if your hard drive's primary active partition is above 2GB and you try to boot from DOS disk then you will get the same error message i.e. 'Invalid Drive Specification'.

I HAVE JUST DONE A FORMAT OF MY HARD DISK AND NOW REQUIRE TO LOAD WINDOWS 98 BUT EVEN THOUGH THE COMPUTER BOOTS UP AT C:\ BUT WHEN I CHANGE DIRECTORY TO D:\ I RECIEVE THE MESSAGE INVALID DRIVE SPECIFIATION. I LOANED THE MSCDEX TO THE C DIRECTORY AND DELETED THE **REM**THAT APPEARED ON THE MSCDEX AT BOOT UP. I REMOVED THIS BY EDIT AUTOEXEC.BAT AND IN THE CONFIG.SYS BUT STILL IT WILL NOT EXCEPT DRIVE D:\ ANY IDEA`S