I have a 30 GIG Maxtor Drive with Windows 98 installed on it. I have an older Western Digital drive (850 meg) that I want to add as a slave drive. My bios recognizes the second drive but when Windows 98 boots up I can not access my second drive. I talked to one person at maxtor and he said that other drives don't work too well with their drives on the same port. So I installed my older hard drive on my second port both as master and as slave and that did not work either. Can you please give me any advice? Thanks!

Make sure the jumper on the older HD is changed to slave. Good luck, Ken

If your BIOS detects the hard drive then I don't think the problem is an incorrect jumper setting. Is the drive partitioned? Use fdisk from the command prompt. If you have an option #5 that says something like "Change fixed disk" then you need to change to that disk, remove any existing partitions and then create a primary partition on that drive. Since the drive is so old I doubt that it's just not partitioned. It would probably have an existing partion not recognizable by 98. If this drive had Windows NT or Linux installed on it previously then that would explain it. Hope this helps.

I just want to be able to read my second drive. I do not want to format it using fdisk.

If you boot from DOS (or '98) boot-disk, can you access the 'problem' HD in any role/position; i.e. installed alone as single Master (first EIDE channel), Slave on first channel, Master on second channel? Regardless of the installed OS (and it is probably DOS or W3x or '9x?) on this drive, unless it's NT, you should be able to access it from a DOS boot-up... There should be no problem in at least being able to 'see' the drive and read/use it as data store along with a more recent HD, be it Slave on channel 1 or Master on channel 2... always presuming that the jumper(s) are set accordingly... (Do not install it as Master on channel 1 (or 2) with a current/newer HD as its slave; that will only 'slow down' access/reads to/from the newer HD...)

I'm not trying to be smart but if you have a 30 GB drive why do you even need the piddly 850 Mb drive anymore? You got tons of room so copy whatever is important off the old drive to the 30 GB drive. It makes no sense to me why you want the 850 Mb drive anymore. Its not worth the hassle for .8 Gb.

Something else I might add, if your plan is to copy from the 850 Mb drive to your new 30 GB drive then boot up to the dos prompt and use XCOPY command (can be found on windows cd) to copy everything over to the new drive. You don't need windows explorer for this. Another thing in my experience even though it looks like the bios has recognized the drive it might not have assigned the correct mode so what I always do is run "ide auto detect" so that the drives are detected properly choose the option that has the flashing (y) in award bios anyway, then save it now reboot and set it back to auto detect. It works for me. If you haven't done this try it.