My hard drive and zip drive switched letters after BIOS upgrade

Adjusted points to 150

Is this an atapi zip drive? I do not see how flashing the system bios would account for the switched drive letters. If this is an atapi zip and if you run fdisk on it and delete the partition, it should revert your second harddrive back to d: you can then recreate the partition and reformat the zip and it maybe assigned e: and not d:. The zip is being treated as a harddrive, is it a master or slave. When you flashed the bios maybe the secondary adapter is now enabled when before it was disabled, this would account for the change of drive mappings and or letters. Please answer the ? I asked so we can help you better.

How was the system configured prior to the BIOS upgrade?
Was the zip drive installed then?
Ralph

first uninstall your zip drive. then open your pc up, and make sure on the primary ide bus, you have your c drive set as master and your second harddrive set as slave. install your cd rom as master in the secondary ide, and if your zip is an atapi type, the zip as the secondary. power up and  go into bios setup and check that all drives have detected correctly. after restarting, reinstall your zip drive.

you might go to system-hardware devices click on the items in question then settings tab and reasign drive letters like you want them.

Sorry speed, it didn't work. I did solve the problem myself however.

I switched my NVRAM jumpers to clear then booted up. When cleared messege came on I went to setup and set The secondary drive master and slave to auto.

Then I let the computer finish booting.

I then shut it down, put the NVRAM jumpers back to the original position and rebooted.

Thanks anyhow.

jakedi

The bios will assign drive letters to physical drives first and then the extended drive. So,if the BIOS sees this as a physical drive, then anything you do will have no effect. This is definitely a BIOS problem. Go back to the BIOS.

Sorry, I didn't see your final response. Forget what I said. I didn't know that you had a 2nd drive on your system. Anyway, that was very strange to say the least.

F.Y.I.  The new BIOS fundamentaly supports the Zip drive.  This device will be treated as you found.  Another rev of the BIOs may treat this as a removable device as it should, but for now, it will handle it this way.

I know for SCSI devices, you can set the SCSI ID. Depending on the SCSI ID, the computer will assign the drives letters to the hard drive and zip drive.  Perhaps, a similar situation is happening in your IDE drives. Can you check  the settings on your Hard drive and zip drive? ( master, slave, slave with master, see the documentation on the hard drive for jumper settings)

Is your operating system NT or 95? If it is NT, I am sure you can change the letter assignment by going to Start/Administrative tools/disk administrator.

Jakedi?  What is the status of this?

jakedi:  Any thoughts on this?