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I have an old Northgate that was made in 1993 (thats when the BIOS was made anyway) and need to know if there is a way to get Windows 98 to see a hard-drive so I can retreive data from it. It will show up fine in BIOS (all settings appear currect, though BIOS only reports it as 8GB).
The drive is a Barracuda 7200RPM 40GB 3.5 size drive (standard IDE connection).
It will show up in FDISK (but not currectly though) and doesn't show up in Windows.
Is there some way to add LBA to the bootsector of the first drive so that the other drive will show up, or is only BIOS capable of turning LBA on? (the BIOS my computer has doesn't have an LBA option in it)
I have been able to use a 80GB drive as a boot drive (but can only partition 504MB capacity).
The motherboard has a lot of ISA connections (oh and the IDE controlloer is a addon card. It isn't built into the motherboard like the newer computers are). And the first 2 ISA slots on the left have an extra slot behind it (for those old videocards that take up alot of space and have on extra connecter on the back).
Any help apprecieted.
There's no bios upgrade that will let that 486 see a 40 gig drive and you don't have any PCI slots for the usual ATA card. The IDE controller card you're using won't go beyond what the 486 bios can see.
Promise made some ISA cards for 486's with their own bios but I think they'd only see up to 4 gig.
If you can find a more recent ISA ATA card it should work but I doubt any were made. A drive overlay should work too.
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"for those old videocards that take up alot of space and have on extra connecter on the back"
It's simpler to refer to those as VLB (Vesa Local Bus)
Hmmm... everything old is new again?
Saying that XP is the most stable MS OS is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable
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Are the files you need to access needed on this computer? You may be better off to get a friend to allow you to temporarily connect this HD to their computer and copy the files to floppies. Or if you just need to retrieve the files but don't need to put them on the 486, burn them to CD or DVD.
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The old HD may have been drvspaced/dblspaced, in which case you might get by with loading the drvspace.bin [dblsoace.sys ?].
If it has an overlay [a la OnTrack et al] you'll have your work cut out for you. In that case I would put the 40G in the newer bos as primary master by itself. If it boots and showa files, then cable the 80G as secondary.
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If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.M2
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A little history of where the 80GB has been used might help. M2 brings up an interesting point. I personnally was thinking this came from a much newer machine and for some reason you needed to access the drive. Do you know what file system is in use on the 80GB? If NTFS, you can't install and read the drive even if you overcome the size limits. Win98 can't access NTFS drives.
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Both drives are FAT32. The 40GB did have a drive overlay type program on it that starts before every else does. If the 80GB showed up as 8GB in BIOS (so did the 40GB), should I beable to partition up to 8GB? Fdisk will only go to 504MB on the 80GB. Formatting the 40GB is out of the question.
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Oh and the computer won't boot from the 40GB. It will come up as a I/O error when it tries.
It almost booted from the 80GB, but there is something wrong with the bootsecter. (probably because I used to use the 80GB in a dualboot system that had Windows XP)
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Also, in FDISK, the 40GB does show up (in DOS 6.22 FDISK is whole other story).
It shows up as the currect size, but the file system is shown as unknown.
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If the drive had an overlay on it you must install the same version of overlay. Post what information comes up when using Fdisk. In your first post you stated you need to retrieve data from the 80GB and then later talk about partitioning the 80GB. You are aware that any attempt to partition the 80GB will cause you to lose all data on that disk? Partitioning the 80GB using Fdisk MAY require Fdisk64 and would require that you select the option to use large disks, which I believe is an option in the version of Fisk you may be using. Without making that selection the max. size partition allowable is 504MB. The reason Fdisk reports the 40GB file system as unknown is because of the drive overlay. Anyway, do you need to retreive data from the 80GB or not?
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Problem solved. I downloaded the Seatools disk maker (It comes with special partitioning and formatting tools as well as Drive Overlay)
The seatools disk I made did wonders. It partitioned and formatted the 80GB to Fat32 and I am now installing WIn98 (I used the "/IR" command to tell windows setup to leave the MBR alone)
Oh and you got my drives switched, I was talking about formatting the 80GB, not the 40GB.
Since the driver overlay is installed now, I should beable to slave the 40GB and it should show up fine. (I might not even have to tell BIOS that its there)
Also, the Drive overlay program thats in the boot record added CD-ROM booting ability. New computers have the ability to boot from CD-ROM, but olders do not. However the DDO program in the boot record seems to have installed this feature so all I have to do to boot from CD is to press C when prompted.
Thanks to whomever has suggested the Drive overlay.
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Oh and yes the DDO I am using is the same version as the one the 40GB had. I downloaded the DDO from the company that made the 40GB.
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Thanks for the help.
I will be sure to add the DDO program to any bootable floppy disks. Since the drive will dissapear if it isn't loaded.
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