My DOS6/Win3.1 system has been having several problems lately. One of them is with hard disk D:\. It's 1.6gb and when I first installed and formatted it, it worked fine. Now it doesn't work. In the BIOS the computer knows that it's there. But in FDISK, I get a message saying "DRIVE 2 (D:\) CANNOT BE ACCESSED!" When I tell the computer to change over from C:\ to D:\, I get this error message: "CDR101: DRIVE NOT READY (ABORT/RETRY/FAIL)" or something like that. It doesn't even let me format it. It is a slave (I even checked). Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Joey

CDR101 is a cdrom error, isn't it? FDisk would give the error you mentioned if it "saw" a cdrom drive. If you specify a drive such as x: and it is not recognized, the error message is "Invalid drive specification". Have you somehow specified that cdrom uses drive letter "d". Or, do you have a limiting lastdrive statement in config.sys? Is it connected on the middle of the cable? Try putting it as master (on end of cable, too) as a test of its actual working status. This is a bit puzzling to me, also, in that you said it did work before.

Sorry. All Fdisk sees are harddrives and partitions. No cdroms. Your "cannot access" error message is new and odd to me. Also, I thought the 1st harddrive in system was numbered as drive 0. Been a while... But, fixed disks (and then partitions, I think) are always assigned drive letters before removeables, so cdroms should not be assigned specific drive letters that would normally be used by harddrives in computer. You assign drive letters in autoexec.bat. At MSCDEX statement, this is accomplished by adding /L:D (for a letter assignment of D: drive). Check to see if this is what is conflicting with the second drive. Good luck.

http://www.bootdisk.com/readme.htm#cdromdos

http://computing.net/dos/wwwboard/forum/14427.html

I found out that my CD-ROM had somehow reset itself to D:\. That's why the hard disk didn't work. But I have another problem: HD D:\ keeps saying an error message. "INVALID MEDIA TYPE READING DRIVE D:\ ABORT, RETRY, FAIL" What does this error mean and how do I correct it?