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D drive in Windows 95

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First post, by captain_koloth

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I have an old Windows 95 PC with HDDs on both C and D, original Win 95 release. As it's getting to its last legs I imaged the drives and made a PCEm clone of the PC (kind of a cool technology that you can do that now).

The real PC has an issue where I'd say about 50% of the time it will recognize the D drive in the BIOS but it won't appear in Windows. I am able to access D from the DOS prompt, even the one within Windows. Usually rebooting helps this problem and the D drive will then appear normally. I assumed this issue was related to some hardware component failure, but the PCEm clone not only has the same issue but rebooting doesn't help there, so there must be a software problem (that is, some information somewhere on C or D is clearly not configured properly).

I can see D in the DOS prompt in PCEm, but not through the Windows interface. The drive is 2 GB and properly formatted and partitioned. I put it here rather than in emulation since as indicated above I believe the underlying issue is one with the real computer's configuration rather than with emulation. Any ideas on what could be wrong here?

Reply 1 of 2, by Jo22

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captain_koloth wrote on 2020-10-07, 11:27:

Any ideas on what could be wrong here?

Well, it's just a wild guess.
DOS retrieves a HDD's grive geometry via BIOS, whereas Win9x uses its own Protected-Mode driver first.
So when the D: drive partition was created with a fake/phantasy drive geometry,
Win95 tries to use what it thinks is the true drive geometry.
Or it fails and detects nothing.
When it works still, it may uses D: in that "16-Bit Compatibility Mode" or how it is called.
You can check/force this in Control Panel/System maybe, not sure.
It's so long ago that I used Win95..

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Reply 2 of 2, by captain_koloth

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Jo22 wrote on 2020-10-07, 11:50:
Well, it's just a wild guess. DOS retrieves a HDD's grive geometry via BIOS, whereas Win9x uses its own Protected-Mode driver fi […]
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captain_koloth wrote on 2020-10-07, 11:27:

Any ideas on what could be wrong here?

Well, it's just a wild guess.
DOS retrieves a HDD's grive geometry via BIOS, whereas Win9x uses its own Protected-Mode driver first.
So when the D: drive partition was created with a fake/phantasy drive geometry,
Win95 tries to use what it thinks is the true drive geometry.
Or it fails and detects nothing.
When it works still, it may uses D: in that "16-Bit Compatibility Mode" or how it is called.
You can check/force this in Control Panel/System maybe, not sure.
It's so long ago that I used Win95..

Where in System would that be?

I'll re-emphasize that the problem also occurs on the real hardware, though intermittently.

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