VOGONS


First post, by Dracolich

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I can't seem to find anything that sounds like my question. I see plenty of threads about a hdd not appearing in Windows 98; however my problem is that the hdd does appear in Win98 but not in DOS mode before Windows is loaded. This evening I found that the PS/2 keyboard on my 233MMX rig died so I am copying the DOS games to my Athlon II rig that runs Win98, at least until I get a new PS/2 keyboard.
On the Win98 pc, the msdos.sys file is edited to not load the gui. It has an 8GB primary master and DVD-RW primary slave. The secondary master and slave are both Western Digital 120GB disks, single partition, formatted FAT32. The primary drives work fine at the DOS prompt but the secondary drives are not accessible via drive letters. After typing win and Win98 is loaded they are available and work fine.
Does anybody know how to get them to work in DOS mode before Windows is loaded? Before now it was not a big deal because the only games installed were the Mechwarrior and Myst series - all Win98 stuff. If I am using it for DOS gaming for a length of time I might need to run them from DOS mode.
Thanks in advance

Reply 2 of 6, by derSammler

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Does the BIOS have support for secondary IDE at all? Otherwise, it would be expected not to see the drive on the secondary IDE in DOS, as DOS completely relies on the BIOS (unlike Windows 9x).

Reply 3 of 6, by dottoss

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I had somewhat similar problem just recently, while i'm on Windows ME though. I formatted a FAT32 partition 100gb from within ME and it refused to be used in dos while working fine from within Windows environment. It was also identified in DOS fdisk but gave something like "Invalid drive specification" when trying to use its drive letter in pure DOS.

I resolved it by changing the "FAT32 id" partition to 0x0c from 0x0b and then DOS worked fine. I used MiniTool Partition Wizard on my main computer with an USB hdd docking station to change the FAT32 ID.

"Two partition types have been reserved for FAT32 partitions, 0x0B and 0x0C. The latter type is also named FAT32X in order to indicate usage of LBA disk access instead of CHS.[42][45][46][47][48]"
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

I don't know if this is the same issue as yours though, as your post does not indicate what really happens when you are trying to use the drive letter or if FDISK is even identifying your larger 120gb partition.

Last edited by dottoss on 2018-05-27, 17:58. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 4 of 6, by Dracolich

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@keenmaster486: I use normal AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, no different than back in the 90s. The only thing I've done differently recently is HIMEMX 😀

@derSlammler: yeah, it's a Biostar M7VIG 400. It has the IDE stuff and I checked the settings, made sure secondary is enabled, UDMA is enabled, etc. I also checked in the main settings, changed the mode from Auto to LBA but that didn't help.

@dottoss: You are genius! Indeed I was getting "Invalid drive specification". FDISK would say that I have NTFS drives. I booted a Partition Wizard cd and checked the FAT32 id on those disks. They were both 0x7, which appears to be an NTFS id. I changed the id to 0xC (LBA), changing on the unused disk first to make sure it worked without losing data. It did! Then I changed it on the other disk, rebooted, and now I see all of my disks in DOS mode. Thanks so much!

Reply 6 of 6, by dottoss

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Dracolich wrote:

@keenmaster486: I use normal AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, no different than back in the 90s. The only thing I've done differently recently is HIMEMX 😀

@derSlammler: yeah, it's a Biostar M7VIG 400. It has the IDE stuff and I checked the settings, made sure secondary is enabled, UDMA is enabled, etc. I also checked in the main settings, changed the mode from Auto to LBA but that didn't help.

@dottoss: You are genius! Indeed I was getting "Invalid drive specification". FDISK would say that I have NTFS drives. I booted a Partition Wizard cd and checked the FAT32 id on those disks. They were both 0x7, which appears to be an NTFS id. I changed the id to 0xC (LBA), changing on the unused disk first to make sure it worked without losing data. It did! Then I changed it on the other disk, rebooted, and now I see all of my disks in DOS mode. Thanks so much!

Cool! I'm happy to hear!

Azarien wrote:

Perhaps the disks used to be partitioned for NTFS, and then whatever you used to format them in FAT32 failed to change the partition type for some reason.

Seems probable. As in my case, Windows ME and Windows 98 should give FAT32 LBA extension when dealing with a partition larger than 4gb (i think) but still gave mine 0x0b. Then again, I'm no expert at the stuff, I solved it by error and trial when comparing the partition that did not work to one that did work and readjusted the partition ID similiar to the one working. Only after googling "Invalid drive specification", it seems to be an issue sometimes with partition id.