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"Setting up new Hard Drive on Windows 98 help!"

My brother managed to grab a Western Digital 180GB Hard Drive from work (amongst a few other top class gooides) however even though he builds and works with PC's almost every day we have hit a problem. The systems he works on at work do not operate under 98 SE and all of his clients PC's run on different OS'. We have been through all of the jumper settings on the hard drive as my current Packard Bell 15GB HD doesn't actually specify which jumper settings to run the drive from.

We have through all of the jumper settings as well as plugging it through a direct route by taking out my DVD drive. Still no luck what so ever.

If anyone could help me with this I would be grateful because as it stands it looks like a dead loss. If it wasn't for me being a total willy and buying a Packard Bell in the first place (was 6-7 years a go though) then I wouldn't be hitting these problems.

Cheers in advance.

Cheers for the help. I tried manually rebooting with both 180GB Hard Drives (one IBM and other Western Digital) and both brought up errors at the start of a manual reboot.

I will have another look tomorrow but my head is hurting now :)

My 5 year old PB supported a 40gb Maxator HDD easily..

:oP

I doubt it will support a huge 180gb HDD. But still, somebody will know for sure. And its not me I'm afraid!

I have just recently installed a new hardrive on my computer.

At first the bios didn't recognise it, so i called up the bios screen and looked around and i found it had recognized my hardrive, then i put in a windows 98 start-up disk and formatted the drive and installed win 98. Everything worked out fine!

If the new hard disk is not detected in BIOS, then there's no chance Windows will ever find it.

BIOS' have an upper limit as to the size of the hard disk they can support - a 5 year old computer is unlikely to support greater than a 40GB hard disk. To find out whether yours will or not, plug the new HD in as primary master (ensure there is no primary slave, unplug other devices if necessary) and see if it is detected in BIOS (make sure it either autodetects or you run the detection manually). If it is not, you have two options:

* Go to the Packard Bell website and look for a BIOS upgrade that allows your motherboard to communicate with hard disks this big.

* Most modern hard disks will allow you to limit their capacity via a jumper setting (look for "Master 40GB" or something similar). This will render most of your hard disk unusable, but at least you'll be able to use some of it.

If neither of these are possible, then it's time to sell the drive/get a new computer.

No probs mate. Anytime :)

Ye I have an SOS disk which I use to install from DOS if anything major goes wrong. The only thing is the fact that some CD/DVD drives don't recognise it. That wouldn't really make a difference though as I would be using the same DVD drive. Its worth a bash as my other HD would still be intact if anything did go wrong. Its worth a play about with as I have setup discs for everything else and all I would be really losing out on would be some irrelevant stuff which I could live without anyway.

I will see what my brother says about it when he comes around as we wanted to do some other stuff before hand. Cheers for the help though, it would probably be the best way around it.

You have a SOS boot floppy don't ya?

ÂLŠ†ÂÎR wrote:
> Also I don't have a setup disc for 98 as Packard Bell put it on one of
> those system restore discs!

Yeah! This PC i'm using now has those stupid master disc things (Packard Bell club 40).

What about unplugging the 15GB - turning the computer on with the SOS BOOT DISC thing (obviously with the 180gb drive)? Usually the CD drive will just use generic drivers anyway which come on the disc. Your scanner and printer can be installed at another time.

Also I don't have a setup disc for 98 as Packard Bell put it on one of those system restore discs!

I am willing to go with the 180GB one however drivers weren't created for my Scanner and Printer to work with anything newer than 98. Plus my CD-Writer drive cme setup with everything and the exact make and model isn't printed on the drive itself for some stupid reason. I might ring them up and give them my make and model and ask for the exact SPEC which I need. That way I could go with the new Hard Drive which is much much bigger.