Hi All,
Here's what's going with my system: I recently bought the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 80GB drive that comes with the Maxtor Ultra ATA 133 PCI card (with the Promise chipset, I believe). I left my existing setup intact (3GB and 13GB Maxtors sharing the primary onboard IDE controller), inserted the ATA 133 card, and connected the 80GB drive to it. So far so good.
I restarted the system with the bootable MaxBlast Plus II v1.30 diskette the drive came with, saw that the ATA 133 controller detected the 80GB drive, and booted into the MaxBlast program. It gave me the option to set up drive 1 on the ATA 133 controller, so I did. It gave me the option to copy over the contents of my existing boot drive but because my current Windows is incredibly messy (lot of dead DLLs, crap in general), I opted to only copy over the system files. I then went through MaxBlast's partitioning of the drive and broke it into the follow partitions:
20GB
15GB
15GB
10GB
10GB
10GB
With that done, the program asked that I remove the diskette and reboot the computer, which I did. When I got back into Windows 98, I was able to see and access the new drive and its partitions with no problems.
It was at this point that I got ambitious. My goals were as follows:
1) Use the 80GB drive as my boot drive
2) Use the ATA 133 as my sole IDE controller
So I shut down the computer, swapped out my existing boot drive (the 3GB Maxtor), connected my 13GB drive to the ATA 133 as the slave drive, and removed the HD settings from my CMOS. The ATA 133 card detected both the 80GB and 13GB drives without any difficulty and booted into the DOS prompt. I pulled up a directory listing of C: and saw that the basic AUTOEXEC.BAT, COMMAND.COM, and CONFIG.SYS files were there. I then checked to see if I could access the other partitions in the DOS environment: no problems at all.
At this point, I went to my Win98SE set up files on the slave drive (I always keep a copy there in case I need it) and began a fresh install of Windows. Scandisk didn't like what it saw -- it insisted that the size of the partitions was being improperly reported. Bearing in mind what I read about MaxBlast-prepared drives butting heads with Microsoft diagnostics, I opted not to "fix" any of the "errors" and re-ran the Windows setup without Scandisk.
So, I began the Windows setup as per normal and it did its copying. After the many propaganda screens about the benefits of registering the product, the setup program arrived at its first reboot prompt. I rebooted and voila -- Windows hung. I tried booting with the Startup disk I made during the installation and wound up with the same result. I then tried some old Win98 boot disks I made a while back. I booted into a DOS prompt and was able to access both the 80GB and the old 13GB drives without any difficulty.
OK, I thought, let's try launching Windows from the DOS prompt. I typed WIN and got a blinking cursor again with no drive activity -- the same as before. I then tried the various Windows command line switches (disabling 32-bit disk access with /F, going directly into safe mode with /N, etc.) but could not get Win98 to launch.
I'm rapidly running out of ideas as to what Windows is complaining about. Below is a list of items in my system that I figure may be related to the problem:
Motherboard: A-Bit BX6 rev 2.0
BIOS: Award from early '99
SCSI Adapter: Adaptec 294x (I can't remember the exact model number and the listing in Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager doesn't give it to me, either)
CD Writer: Yahama 400 (SCSI)
CD-ROM drive: Panasonic 589 (currently handled by the secondary onboard IDE controller)
So anyone have any ideas as to what's going on? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Asimov
