two years ago added a western dig 80 gig HD. It required an add-on bios thing which came in the box. All worked well. This past spring I added a memorex dvd burner. after that the computer would not shut down. I tried previous date restores all the way back until new. No luck on shut-down. I tried making the dvd slave and IO magic cd burner master--no luck. Then I tried to re-load win 98. All looked normal until it asked me to re-boot the second time. It will not boot. With dos boot disk, it says C: and D: and the cd and dvd all "invalid drive specification". I took the C drive out and connected it to another computer (running win 95) it also could not see the drive and gave invalid drive spec message. Using dos disk , fdisk showed partition as a non-dos partition. Is that normal after the western digital bios (ez loader) change ? Any suggesttions on how to salvage in the info on the disk. I am pretty sure the D: drive will come up ok if I can get to windows. I really don't want to fdisk and format the drives --unless absolutely required. Any help will be greatly appreciated. bwana

the bios overlay program will make the fdisk shows non-partition. did you try to boot up the machine without the cd drives attached to see if it will shut down OK?

DVD should be primary slave...burner should be 2ndary master. If you have a 2nd HDD, it should be 2ndary slave. If the above config won't work because of cabling issues, make the 2nd HDD the 2ndary master & the burner the 2ndary slave.

I'm agree with budm, The ez bios is causing the problem. Put HDD's back like they were when ez bios was installed. With overlay installed you can't get anything from boot floppy, it must boot from the primary C: drive so overlay is loaded. ez bios modified the primary with the overlay, then both drives are working under the overlay. Possibly reload ez after opticals are installed, it allows reload. The shutdown problem may be completely different cause. google win98 shutdown problem. Best

I'll try your suggestions --but essentially that's what I did after the win 98 re-install. It was off the NEC restore disk -- hope it didn't write anything too weird on the boot sector. For smiles, I put in a clean small HDD -- w/nothing on it. My computer will not see it --it won't see anything. I thought that atleast using fdisk that I could view the partition info etc.... when I put the drives on another machine --I can use fdisk -- but on the NEC -- I get "no fixed disks installed" message. this weekend I will try to set NEC bios to default setting and try to reload the EZ bios. I also rustled up an old norton diagnostics floppy -- maybe I can learn something else about the machine. I co worker suggested I remove power and the motherboard battery and then afterwards set bios to default and the try the ez loader bios overlay. So, I have a couple of options to try. If they all fail, I was thinking about loading the win 98 onto the clean hdd and then set default and see if I can atleast get the machne up and save what I need to. All suggestions are appreciated -- thanx ! bwana

I have done some of the stuff above and have been able to get to DOs on C: drive. Still can't get to D:. Cabn't get to windows. When I try to get to Win, I get a message -- something like "vfat unable to access resource of file needed for windows". Also, Most of the time I can't get to the cd drives. Any further suggestions --you guys are really helping but I haven't been able to spend the time to work thru this daily. bwana