i have recently had an error on my primary 16gb hard drive, i also have a 80 gb slave drive installed , just for data.I had a major problem with primary drive, so installed a new 80gb hitachi drive as primary, installing win 98/then upgrade to win 98se.I am now unable to find the slave drive, even running hard disk recognition in the bios.I can easily find my old primary drive, when i install as a slave drive. I have tried every jump pin config, on all drives.I have tried both at 32gb clip, its only way primary will run.I previously installed the 80gb slave drive with seagate installation prog.If i do this again , i will loose all data from that drive.I have also run seagate tools, which recognises the disk.It does not show up in dos.Any help would be appreciated thanks nick

Don't just randomly try jumpers. Go the manufacturer web site, and see how the jumpers on BOTH hard drives should be set. Then make sure both drives are seen in BIOS. (or not) Please post back after you do the research and make sure everything is correct. What computer make/model? You can avoid many of these Windows problems with Linux. Linspire eases the transition for new users

hi gxi, i have followed the instructions of manufacturer, but these did not work. i have tried to get recognition of the the offending drive in dos, but with no luck. i am concernerned that its an 80 gb disk, which installed originally with seagate installation as 80gb.However i am now unable to get 80gb recognised in current system. its a time system pentium 2 500mhz processor nick

You may have a BIOS limitation that cannot see the full size, although it MAY work corretly anyway. What computer make/model? BTW there is no Pentium II 500 processor. You can avoid many of these Windows problems with Linux. Linspire eases the transition for new users

hi gxi sorry pentium 3, i have run seatools diagnostics, which recognises it as a drive, but as i understand, as its 80gb ,,,full size because it was installed originally with seagate install tools, then it is invisible to the bios.however its invisible to everything, so struggling to find a way without using seagate disc wizard, as i suspect this reformats it, which i do not wish to do any more ideas please? nick

I think i know what happened. Your BIOS has a 32GB limit. When you first installed the 80 GB drive as a slave the 16 GB was master and you used the drive overlay software to install the 80 GB. The problem that they don't tell you is that the drive overlay is loaded into the MBR of the boot drive (which is your 16 GB drive). Since the 16 GB is no longer the boot drive you cannot access the 80 GB drive. You maybe able to install the overlay in config.sys in order to access the old 80 GB drive. If you have the old overlay software try that but don't use it with the drive in, as it may try to re-install the drive and wipe all the data off. I would check with the drive/overlay manufacturer. The first time this happened to me. The boot drive failed and I also lost the slave. Since then I have done only one successful recovery. Took a long time to find the software. to allow me to read the drive. I no longer use any overlay software on any system.

I agree with Wizard-Fred. It's an overlay problem. I'm not positive, but I think just running the Seagate overlay option could fix you up. But if you have access to another system, it would be a good idea to hook the #2 drive up to it and backup all the data before you try anything. Of course you should 'always' have all your data backed up.