No fixed disk present

[Ewayne]

Hi,

I have a nasty problem.

OS Win98.

I have a PC with two hard drives each with several partitions.

I can boot from either drive and I copy
non replacable files from one drive to the
other for backup.

Last friday the PC locked up and when I
tried to reboot the nasty message came
up saying no OS found and the BIOS
shows no hard drives.

My guess is that I lost the MBR and FAT's

I removed the two drives and installed
a new drive and Win98 and that works
ok so it looks like the motherboard and
IDE controlers are ok.

From what I have found out, if a hard drive
is not partioned it will not be recognized
and it will not be assigned a drive letter.

Just for the heck of it I removed the new
drive and reinstalled the old primary
drive on the primary IDE, booted the
the PC with the Win98 startup.

I tried:
fdisk /mbr and
fdisk

(I can live if I lose most of the files on
that drive)

and I get the message no fixed disk
present.

How can I put a dummy partion on the
drive so it is recognized.

Then maybe I can use some software
like Lost and Found to recover most of the files.

Thanks,

Ewayne

[NeoStarO1]

First of all a hard drive does not need to be partition to be reconized. Partition are only a way of organizing your disk with separete "hard drives" meaning like a file cabinet with 3 or 4 drawers instead of one big whopping drawer.

Boot then go into bois and see if you can manually change the hdd settings with user settings. Can get all the settings off your hard drive itself on the face of it.

See if post and if still in error then make sure your jumpers are set correctly. For one hard drive it should be set as Master or Cable Select.
then see if you have post and reconizes your drive.

If yes, then go from there.

AFAIK there is no such thing as a "dummy partition" either you have them or you don't.

For dual hdd setups
jumpers should be master for the first one on PRI1 (IDE1) and then slave or cable select for second drive on the PRI2 (IDE2)channel.

Post back results and we will tackle things one at a time.


Edit: BTW Welcome to TechIMO.

[S.D.Willie]

sounds like your drive bought the farm. it happens alot. even sometimes you get a bad controller on the system board.

check the warranty status of the drive maybe. luckily theyre pretty cheap these days.

SD

if the jumpers are right and bios is set to auto detect it doenst matter if anything or nothing is on it. bios should see it like posted im almost any case. (ide)

[Foggy]

Have you tried to hookup one of your old drives as a slave to the new working drive? You might be able to copy your important files to the new drive.

[zen]

You could run scandisk on the drive in question. You may have just dropped a cluster or two and still be able to salvage the drive.Among other things, ScanDisk checks the disk platters for defects and also looks for lost clusters that are sometimes created when a program aborts.