Hi, Sorry if this is too detailed... I recently bought a Maxtor 80GB HD for my PII 500mhz win98 PC. I installed it as a slave on the same cable as my primary drive then used disk2disk s/w to duplicate my old HD data and apps (including OS) to the new drive. I then removed the old drive (it had been having problems for weeks) and made the new drive the master. The pc boots up fine, but it runs VERY slowly-- especially apps that interact w/ the HD a lot. The new drive also came w/ an Ultra ATA133 PCI card which I've since tried installing and connecting the new HD to (hoping to speed things up). During bootup the PC ses the card, acknowledges the HD is there, but then fails to load win98. Instead it drops off with the a: prompt. I THINK the pc is trying to boot from a (now)non-existant HD on the motherboard, then failing to load win98 when it can't find it. Does ANYONE have an idea what's going on? Any advice is appreciated.

Go into the Bios setup routine and disable the (now) non-existant drive(s). You might have to also tell the bios to boot from a SCSI drive. The Ultra card might be simulating a SCSI drive.

Thanks, Dale. I'll give that a try. I know when I last looked into the system BIOS the old drive was in fact still listed-- I merely rearranged the boot priority to look first at the floppy, then the new Ultra card-- rather than the previous order of floppy, CDRW, (old) HD, then Ultra. I'll try disabling the old drive first, then try booting from a SCSI if that doesn't work. Thanks again for the advice.

got the right cable for the ata? needs a special one. I have same set up and did the same thing with np's. good luck

That HDD requires an 80 conductor 40-pin cable. It should have came with the HDD. The PCI adapter needs to have its software installed before it will function correctly. One way to do this is to install it using your new HDD attached to the MOBO IDE. Then, once the software is installed, try hooking the IDE cable for the new HDD to the IDE connector on the PCI adapter.

Thanks, guys. Yes, the HD did come with the 80 conductor 40-pin cable... I've been using it. I installed the PCI card software when I installed the card, but it may be worth reinstalling (there was a time following the card/software install that I removed the card to try some other fixes, then reinstalled the card-- maybe the s/w was tweaked in some way.) I'll give it a try and report back w/ the results.

Another thing that may be off is your motherboard chipset drivers. These can be reinstalled using the driver CD that comes with your MOBO or from the website of your chipset manufacturer.