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W98SE: Bluescreens after adding a second HDD

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First post, by Kurasiu

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Well, ok, the title is a bit misleading, as it didn't bluescreen from the very beginning, but nonetheless: recently I picked up an 80GB PATA hard drive from a local pawn shop. Worked like a charm for several days. However during one startup Windows informed me that the drive may have bad sectors on it, and a scandisk /surface is required. After that Windows (98 SE) pretty much refused to work - everytime a 0E fatal exception at 0028:XXXXXXXX bluescreen occured during every system startup, before the Net Logon prompt - and an unrecoverable one, as the system refuses to load anything after the bluescreen, shows only the wallpaper and that's it.

Decided to boot to DOS 7.0, copy the most valuable files from the second drive (several things were already installed on it), downloaded Hiren's Boot CD and performed a low level format. Seemed like it did the trick, as scandisk, or any other drive utility, didn't show bad sectors any more. Well, all is nice - but Windows is still throwing a bluescreen on every startup.
And here's the thing - the system loads and works like a charm, when the second HDD is disconnected.

So my question is - any way to restore the system and/or the HDD, so they can be both used again? Already tried reformatting/fdisking the HDD, deleting every single trace of software that was installed on the second drive in Windows, but still no avail. Any solution to this one?

EDIT: bump, as I saw that Windows will indeed work with the second HDD... but only when the CD ROM is disconnected. Wow, an IDE devices conflict?

Reply 1 of 3, by Jorpho

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For starters, check to make sure the drive jumpers are set correctly. In particular, the hard drives may have different settings for "master with slave present" and "master with no slave". Don't ever use "cable select" if you can possibly avoid it.

Let the BIOS auto-detect the devices if the BIOS isn't already set up to do so. Trying to set the devices manually can cause problems, even if the settings look correct.

You may want to try a live Linux CD for diagnostic purposes.

There are obscure cases when an SB Live combined with a Via chipset can cause hard drive problems, but you'd need to tell us more about your system.

Reply 3 of 3, by Kurasiu

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Indeed, there must've been some kind of a conflict, as everything is fine now. Though I wonder WHY it worked normally before...
the initial configuration with jumpers was
Primary master - system HDD
Primary slave - X
Secondary master - second HDD
Secondary slave - CD-ROM

and it was fine, until the 'bad sectors' error appeared. Even BIOS started spitting nonesense, when all three devices were connected.
Same thing happened with different jumpers configurations, so out of desperation I switched all three devices to cable select mode, now it looks like this:
Primary master - X
Primary slave - system HDD
Secondary master - CD-ROM
Secondary slave - second HDD

and wow, it actually works, like it did before. 😀 So yeah, automatic selection did the trick!

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