second Hard drive problem

[Giles McKeown]

Hi I have put a second HD (20Gb)into a mates computer. It is a Pentium 75 with 850 MB HD I have got the bios to accept the second drive, it is sitting in Windows 95 system properties, but it is not listed in the "My computer".
When i go to system properties and try to allocate a letter to it, it will not allow me to put one in. The only option that is usable in there is to make it a removable drive.
Does anyone know how i can get the windows to allocate a drive letter to it and have it recognised in the o/s
When i use the fdisk to check the drive, it gives it the leter D which is the cd rom letter.
One thing i think might be causing the problem is that the old HD doesnt have jumpers on it. Could this cause Windows in some way to not allow it a drive letter?
Thanks for any help, G.

[Zoriphus]

What other IDE components does your "mate" have in his PC? How are the two drives configured? As in Master or Slave? If the computer doesn't like the jumperless HD, give it its own IDE channel. Perhaps like this...

Primary IDE Channel:
20GB HD as the Master
a CD-ROM as the Slave

Then on the Secondary IDE Channel:
850MB HD as the master.

What HD is your new one? (Make and Model)
What kind of mobo is in question?

Good luck and keep us posted.

Zoriphus

[Shinma]

Was the drive formatted with FAT16?

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"I know nothing."
Cheers.

[Giles McKeown]

Hi Shinma, Zoriphus,

Shinma i just used fdisk to partition it as an extended drive. Did not format it as yet. His computer is that slow it was taking too much time and i left it to contact here. In fdisk it was giving it the letter D, if i was going to format it i would probably have done so with a fat 32. Do you think the windows 95 would need it formatted as fat16?
Have never dealt with his computer before and its so old that i am not sure about it.
Dont know what mobo it is. I have the new 20 G set as slave to the 850 mb jumperless drive. Could try having the old drive on an ide of its own and put the cd rom as slave to the 20G - but have always heard that it is better to keep the cd rom seperate from the HD.
I had said that it would be best to forget about the 850mb and just have the 20G in - heard that you can copy the entire contents of one drive to another but do not know that file command to use for that. Do you know which dos command can do that?
I have him saving all his work on floopys so that if possible he will accept the 20G alone in the system.
Thanks again for any help, G

[ST:TNG]

Hi, G - The DOS command for copying the way you mean is XCOPY /s. It makes an exact copy, and the /s parameter copies subdirectories. It will not transfer the "bootability" however, since the boot sector needs to be created by an installation of the OS. But at least you'll have a \Windows directory. Hopefully DOS can read the file system which I'm pretty sure has to be FAT16 rather than FAT32 or NTFS. Don't know which version of W95 always formats in FAT32.

If you need help with XCOPY, go to the DOS prompt and type XCOPY/?.

The other fellows who are helping you are probably waiting for answers back to their other questions.

Good luck.

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If you can't be a good example,
then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
- - - Catherine Aird - - -