I have bought a new system: P4 2GHz 256Mb DDR333. I have succesfully installed win98SE on one HD. I have a hard disk of Maxtor (40Gb) with an older installation of Windows98 AND with all my documents. Now Win98 SE doesn't recognise the Maxtor HD. Resulying in: me not possible to get access to my documents. What do I have to do to make Win98 detect the drive. NOTE: the Bios DOES detect the drive correctly! The jumper settings are correct! The IDE cable is not defect. In other words: it is not a hardware problem. Thank you.

Let it be clear: I want the Maxtor HD to work as a slave.

Hi Planner, What brand is the Primary Hard drive? I take it you mean both hard drives are on the same IDE Cable. Are you using an 80 pin or 40 pin IDE cable? Good Day! Mesich

Yes, they are on the same IDE cable. I'm not sure if it is an 80 or a 40 pin cable. It's the standard IDE cable wich one gets when bying a hard drive. The first (master) hd is a Seagate 4Gb 5400 rpm, the second one is Maxtor 40Gb 7200 rpm. I heard that win98 will not detect it untill I make partitions. I this the sollution: making partitions? Any other ideas?

With an 80 pin IDE cables you should have the Master on one end of the cable and the other end of the cable connected to the IDE on the Motherboard. The middle of the IDE cable goes to the Slave. Ensure the Western Digital jumper settings is Master. When using a Western Digital on an IDE alone it must be selected as a Single. Sounds as if both hard drives have been partitioned. I say this because you loaded Windows on the new drive, and would not be able to do so without an active formatted partition. Also because the second drive was fine until trying to use it as a Slave drive. As far as your question with, "Windows will not detect the partition until the drive until you partition it neither will Dos. Try Making your current slaved drive a Master on the Second IDE. Set the Jumper settings on the Western Digital to Single (no jumper) and the Seagate to Master on the Secondary IDE. Mesich

I agree with Mesich. You almost surely have a plugging or cabling error.

No, it's not what you think. I figured out what the problem is. The Maxtor harddisk used to be in an old computer. A Celeron 300MHz. The Bios of that system didn't recognise the HD. Maxtor delivers a sotware disk (with the HD) to trick the BIOS. The software is called EZ-BIOS. Now, what I have to do is uninstall that software. Windows doesn't see the HD as a FAT32 drive. If I uninstall the EZ-Bios then the drive will be a FAT32 drive. So, that's what I would do if my floppy drive didn't die just now. :( So I will have my problem solved if I get an floppy drive to work. Thanks all for helping.