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zayedj

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HD recognition problem on win98

I bought a 40 GB Wetsern HD, and tried to put it as master with my old 13 GB wetern digital HD (the 13 GB is slave), on the bios everything is fine , and both are recognized but when I enter on win98 the 40 GB is recognized while the 13 GB is not seen at all,
I tried making the 13 GB the master and the 40 GB the slave and it worked fine , Why is that?
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jhance

This is NOT a Win98 issue.  It's a BIOS issue with your motherboard.

You need to do one of:

1) Get a BIOS update that supports hard drives larger than 32GB.

2) Use the WD supplied HDD overlay software.
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Wakeup
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Good call Wakeup.

In addition if it is not due to NTFS (New Technology File System ie.. NT), if that hard drive was one distributed from a proprietary PC company ie.. gateway, dell, or comcrap then they (on some older systems) write a special sector to the harddrive that does not allow it to be seen. They do this so that you have to use there special Boot Recovery CDs to get the system up and going again (try and keep you in thier support plan).
What happens is that the OS and all data associated to it (installed through it) is accually underlayered into a type of separate partition on the hard drive.  
What Ive always done in those cases is just flat out formated the drives to get away from there junk. Then goto there website and download the drivers for the board and installed them separately.

OK back to your question. To know if the Harddrive (13Gig) data is layed in under a layer, boot with a windows 98SE boot disk. At the C> prompt see if you can see any data there ie.. windows. Do a C:>dir  [enter]

Please report back with what you find on this.

Also you might try making sure that when you make the 40Gig the Primary that the Data cable connects to it first then ends at the 13 Gig.
Also double check to make sure you have the jumpers set correctly to Slave on it and not as cable select. Refer to the Western Digital website to get the correct jumper settings for that hard drive. I have had in the past a hard drive mislabled on the jumper settings and had to goto the site to get the correct one.
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ASKER

well thanks jhance and wakeup but it still doesnt solve the   problem
jhance,
the bios supports over 32gb , the problem is not in the bios

wakeup,
In the command prompt the partitions are not seen, though they are  fat 32 not ntfs ,yet I will try using fdisk as you said and I will keep you notified,
by the way when I transferred some files between them and then put the 40 GB as mster again the files were, when I put it  back as slave the files were there

again, Thank you for your time
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ASKER

Actually I dont know  what the problem is, though it is solved now , I just formatted both HDs and then everything went well , I guess they mut hve been partitioned using  different utilities , atleat I now one was partitioned  using EZ.

Thanks lot for the help.