I must admit my computer knowledge is kind of scatterbrained... Fdisk right now seems to be the only way out of the perdiciment of none of my periphial components, nor my floppys, nor either my new cd-rom or cd-rw working. The old one was traded for the new one (which has now been traded for a newer one then that). I thought that installing this one would be as simple as the last few i've done before; nope. My first drive was atapi, the second I found out later was scsi (I now have another atapi). My system was working totally fine until I attempted the scsi drive. After installing as usual (red strip towards, 1 on 1), windows didn't recongnize either of the cd drives! Confused I looked under the system in control panel. It was saying the floppy and the cd drives were in dos compatibility paging mode, winhelp didn't clear anything. I have the bios settings written from the days of perfect functionality; so I went ahead with bios setting changing. The floppy joined the cd's in being unseen by windows. I promptly reverted all settings back to the original setting before all this happened... Concisely, I have a computer which has no hardware functionaling except the minimum (board, cpu, video card, etc.) and no drives to install them from (the to is still functioning swell). What brings my mind to think it is a windows problem is that the bios recognizes the drives! The add hardware wizard doesn't help windows recognize any of them, and I can't manually install anything either. I only have a few things on my drive that I can't get back, but they can leave if I can have a working computer again...would fdisk help the situation? Right now I am typing to this forum from my college's comp room (testament to no modem). Would installing a scsi cdrom take down my computer like this? What else could I have messed up? I would like to thank eveyone in advance, I would really appreciate the help, but acknowledge that my writing skills are poop and apologize for not being as coherent as everyone else. THANK Y0U AND SEE YOU LATER

boot from a Windows 98 boot disk and see if it recognizes the drives and if it does than it is definitely a windows problem. If it doesn't, it is most likely a hardware or bios problem.

Hi Anon, Try to remove all entries in the CD-ROM, Hard-disks, and the IDE controller section, restart the machine, and let the windows reinstall all the devices for you. Just select 'Next' when it ask for the IDE driver and it will find at windows\inf\mshdc.inf eventually. You'll probably need to install a device driver for your SCSI card which controls the SCSI CD, if the device is not covered by MS windows. Try that first and see how it goes. I don't think you need to set anything with BIOS unless you wish to boot-up from the CD.

If you think fdisk is the solution to your problem then it is time to take your computer to the shop or find a knowledgeable friend to help you. Fdisk simply prepares a hard drive to be used by DOS/Windows. it doesn't solve problems like yours. Neither will defrag or scandisk. You don't mention a SCSI adapter card. Any SCSI device you have (hard drive or CD-ROM) has to plug into a SCSI adapter card. IDE/Atapi drives use a different adapter system. Do you have a SCSI adapter or did you plug the SCSI drive in with the IDE/Atapi drives? Anyway, Joel offers good advice above. 1. Check your BIOS to make sure all 4 of your hard drive settings are turned to "auto". 2. Boot using a boot disk and see what drives DOS can find. If DOS can't find the drive, then neither will Windows. www.bootdisk.com

Preston, IDE using 40pins connector, while SCSI use 50-60 pins connectors. The user could not possibly have made that mistake even if try.

I am a computer tech.... and this is a problem I am having with a floppy drive... this isn't a bios setting or anything to do with your hardware... this is windows problem... windows runs in a 32 bit or protected mode... Dos runs in 16 bit or real mode... and for some reason Windows isn't recongnizing the drivers in the 32 bit mode... in the file Ios.ini is a list of protected drivers for windows... you should be able to add the drivers that you need to this list... and in theory it will run..... good luck...

Whoa, before running madly into this, boot into safe mode and examine the system settings. If you have duplicates of devices, or devices that you do not recognise, then REMOVE them. I have experience of windows adding duplicate devices and removing them in SAFE mode is always the first option. Duplicates are likely if you tried to boot into windows using a M/C incorrectly configured. good luck, hope this helps.