Unfortunately, I'm still having problems. Before looking into Norton Ghost, I decided to re-connect up the drives one by one, which has now caused a new issue. Every time I booted, it kept putting my E drive as the C drive and therefore it couldn't boot Windows. Figured I needed to change the boot order and select the right drive, and while that put the correct drive back to C, it still complains there's no Windows. 🙁 It gets past the Windows logo splash screen, but then gives up. Went back to reformat it again and I'm right back to it complaining that I need to insert the Windows CD in the D drive. I just know that if I try and disable each drive again, I'm just going to wind up going round in circles with it. 🙁

EDIT: Okay, looks like I was wrong. A is considered to be CDBOOT. Whereas F is actually the contents of the Windows 98 CD. Still no idea why it complains about the CD not being in the D drive though. But if it's recommended to install Windows via the CD's setup instead, I'll give that a go and see what happens.

EDIT 2: Christ, it really is never ending with the amount of problems I keep facing. For some stupid reason, the computer has taken it upon itself to label the C drive with a load of weird symbols, so there's no chance of being able to re-type it out to re-create a DOS partition. 🙁

Okay, after some messing about with the boot order, the volume name was set to blank again. Phew. 😮‍💨

Regarding the A and F drive: looks like something I did jiggled the boot order in a way that allowed me to access C, D, E, and F. Then I was able to access the Windows 98 CD properly. Unfortunately now though, I can’t seem to get that back. It keeps assigning C with drive D, and sometimes D as E. At the moment, I can only access A, C and D. E and F aren’t recognised. FDISK only shows C and D, which are correct, but there’s no sign of E. There’s also a mysterious and unassigned 10GB knocking about that I don’t know where it belongs.

Again, I really don’t want to have to disconnect any drives just to access the CD drive properly and reinstall, only to reconnect everything and have it re-assign the wrong drive letters again. 🙁

D’oh. Okay, selecting Start computer with CD support does at least assign a drive letter to the CD-ROM - either E or F. So that’s sorted. The problem is formatting the C drive without disconnecting the others. I can’t even use BootCD (A:) and use the format c: command. 😕 Using the OEM setup now gives me an error and won’t go any further, so I can’t format it that way. And if I do access the CD’s setup, it will run through a quick ScanDisk and then hang when it tries to gather needed files for Windows.

Okay, this is a bit confusing. Let's just make sure your setup is correct.

Windows 98 needs to be installed on the primary partition of the first physical hard disk. You need to connect the drive you want to install Windows on as the primary master, on the IDE1 connector of your motherboard (consult manual to see which one that is).

Then boot from the Windows 98 boot floppy, choosing "2: Start computer with CD-ROM support" in the floppy's boot menu. When it's done booting, run FDISK, select disk 1, and make sure you have a primary, active (PRI DOS, A) partition with the letter C assigned. Quit FDISK and format C: from the command line. If it can't find the format command, it's on the CD at \win32\format.com.

At that point, you should have A: as your floppy, C: as your empty primary partition. Make sure that C: is accessible by running a DIR command on it. Any other FAT partitions that DOS sees will have D, E, F assigned, and your CD-ROM drive letter comes after those.

At that point, you run D:\win98\setup.exe, substituting D: with your actual CD-ROM letter.

asdf53 wrote on Today, 03:24:

Okay, this is a bit confusing. Let's just make sure your setup is correct. […]
Show full quote

Okay, this is a bit confusing. Let's just make sure your setup is correct.

Windows 98 needs to be installed on the primary partition of the first physical hard disk. You need to connect the drive you want to install Windows on as the primary master, on the IDE1 connector of your motherboard (consult manual to see which one that is).

Then boot from the Windows 98 boot floppy, choosing "2: Start computer with CD-ROM support" in the floppy's boot menu. When it's done booting, run FDISK, select disk 1, and make sure you have a primary, active (PRI DOS, A) partition with the letter C assigned. Quit FDISK and format C: from the command line.

At that point, you should have A: as your floppy, C: as your empty primary partition. Any other FAT partitions that DOS sees will have D, E, F assigned, and your CD-ROM drive letter comes after those.

At that point, you run D:\win98\setup.exe, substituting D: with your actual CD-ROM letter.

Confusing is an understatement. 😅 You might want to check this thread of mine from a short time ago about issues I was having with my HDDs and IDEs:

HDD Issues and Concerns

Basically, for whatever reason, my E drive seems to have issues with IDE 3 and 4 to the point that the PC/ScanDisk kept complaining about errors on the drive. I lost a lot of my CD images, which is what I use the drive for. It only seemed to stop once I connected the drive into IDE 1. HDD C and D are happily in IDE 3 and 4, which I’m led to believe are faster controllers that are more suited to HDDs. All three HDDs are connected using an 80 wire cable.

In the end, I had to disconnect the molex power cable from HDD D and E. Just to get the sodding thing to only recognise C and format it. As I’ve busted my floppy drive (again), I’m currently unable to use a boot disk. I believe I have one made though. And for some reason I can’t format using a command prompt. It just tells me Bad command or file name. So I had to format it using the OEM setup. Then switched to the setup on the disc using Load computer with CD-ROM support.

I did get two BSOD during the setup of Windows. On two occasions. 😕 The first time it was Fatal Exception Error 06 and then the second time it was 0C. And one happened right after setting up the clock/date and time.
It’s managed to take me to the desktop and everything appears to be fine. I also replugged the other HDDs in one at a time and it didn’t complain this time about Windows being missing. Even when it incorrectly assigned C to D again. I’ve set up the boot order so they’re right again and it’s still booting fine. It just isn’t recognising my E drive for some reason. I can only presume I just need to install some IDE controller drivers.

And that’s where I’m at currently. I dare say I’ll return to it later and find the whole thing refusing to boot again. 🙄😅

You should only be using the standard HDD controller of your board right now (IDE1 and IDE2). If your system is unstable or behaves erratically, you want to minimize the potential error sources - run at safe clock speeds, remove all unnecessary hardware. If you're using two IDE controllers at once, you can't know which one of them causes problems.

Unable to format is because it cannot find format.com. It's at \win98 on the CD. In any case, none of what I wrote above is going to work if you boot from the CD and use the OEM setup.

If you're using two hard disk contollers, you have to install drivers for the second one under Windows, or it won't see any drives connected to it. By default, the BIOS (and Windows) can only see the first two IDE channels.

If the second controller has its own BIOS though (it shows its own boot screen), it won't need additional drivers.

asdf53 wrote on Today, 04:36:

You should only be using the standard HDD controller of your board right now (IDE1 and IDE2). If your system is unstable or beha […]
Show full quote

You should only be using the standard HDD controller of your board right now (IDE1 and IDE2). If your system is unstable or behaves erratically, you want to minimize the potential error sources - run at safe clock speeds, remove all unnecessary hardware. If you're using two IDE controllers at once, you can't know which one of them causes problems.

Unable to format is because it cannot find format.com. It's at \win98 on the CD. In any case, none of what I wrote above is going to work if you boot from the CD and use the OEM setup.

If you're using two hard disk contollers, you have to install drivers for the second one under Windows, or it won't see any drives connected to it. By default, the BIOS (and Windows) can only see the first two IDE channels.

If the second controller has its own BIOS though (it shows its own boot screen), it won't need additional drivers.

Is it wise to have the CD drive connected to the same IDE as the HDDs? I swear I read, or was told, it’s not a good idea…? In any case, my motherboard manual says to use IDE 1 or 2 for CD drives. So during my recent setup I was using IDE 3 for HDD C and IDE 1 for the CD-ROM.

And yeah, IDE 3 and 4 use High Point. A manager appears during boot. If it doesn’t need drivers then I’m not sure why HDD E isn’t being recognised. 😕

It's not a problem in general, that's how it was done usually. It's just that that a small number of IDE controllers are buggy, and that's where that recommendation comes from. There were some CMD and VIA controllers with that problem, but your primary IDE controller (Intel) should be fine.

What your board manual says is, don't use CD drives on IDE 3 and 4, the HighPoint controllers don't like that. But on IDE 1 and 2, you can mix HDD and CD drives.

If Windows can't see the drive on the second controller, boot into DOS and see if FDISK can see the drive (change the physical disk number from 1 to the other ones). If it can't , then the controller BIOS doesn't expose the hard disks through the default BIOS interface - Windows won't see them unless you install the HighPoint driver. If FDISK can see the drive, but Windows can't, then it's a Windows issue - but probably also fixed by installing the HighPoint driver.

But as I said, right now, it would be a better idea to disable the HighPoint entirely in the BIOS and only use the first controller (IDE1 and IDE2) for HDD and CDROM. If you get Windows working with that, you can still hook up your drives to the second one later.

asdf53 wrote on Today, 06:01:

It's not a problem in general, that's how it was done usually. It's just that that a small number of IDE controllers are buggy, […]
Show full quote

It's not a problem in general, that's how it was done usually. It's just that that a small number of IDE controllers are buggy, and that's where that recommendation comes from. There were some CMD and VIA controllers with that problem, but your primary IDE controller (Intel) should be fine.

What your board manual says is, don't use CD drives on IDE 3 and 4, the HighPoint controllers don't like that. But on IDE 1 and 2, you can mix HDD and CD drives.

If Windows can't see the drive on the second controller, boot into DOS and see if FDISK can see the drive (change the physical disk number from 1 to the other ones). If it can't , then the controller BIOS doesn't expose the hard disks through the default BIOS interface - Windows won't see them unless you install the HighPoint driver. If FDISK can see the drive, but Windows can't, then it's a Windows issue - but probably also fixed by installing the HighPoint driver.

But as I said, right now, it would be a better idea to disable the HighPoint entirely in the BIOS and only use the first controller (IDE1 and IDE2) for HDD and CDROM. If you get Windows working with that, you can still hook up your drives to the second one later.

Okay, thanks. I guess I'll do a bit of experimenting first before I start with Ghost. I mean, the last thing I want is for some hardware/technical problem to cause a BSOD, files become corrupted, and then that faulty state gets backed up to an image. I also installed the latest High Point drivers before, when I had HDD E connected to IDE 3/4, but I was still having issues.

FDISK certainly wasn't seeing drive E when I was playing around with it last night/this morning. It was only seeing devices on IDE 1 and 2. I don't recall seeing an option to disable HighPoint, but I'm sure it's there; I'll take a look later. It definitely shows IDE 1 and 2 though.

Yeah, the issue I've run into at the moment is that IDE 1 and 2 need 40 pins and 3 and 4 need 39. The HDDs (C, D, and E) need 39. I did get a hole made in one 80 pin cable for the E drive in order to hook it up to IDE 1/2, but it looks like I'd need to do the same for a cable for C and D to connect to IDE 1/2 instead.

EDIT: Okay, I managed to make a hole with a pin. It's connected up perfectly anyway. To begin with, it wasn't detecting anything, but I think I hadn't pushed the IDE connectors into the HDDs properly. Both drives are now recognised as Primary Master (C) and Primary Slave (D). 😀

Okay, progress, of sorts. I’ve put HDD C and D to IDE 1 and HDD E is connected to IDE 3. Just connected one device at a time. Reinstalled Windows without any issues. No BSOD issues and Windows is back up and running.

For some reason it’s seeing drive D twice. And though HighPoint recognises E, it still doesn’t appear. It tried to install drivers, but couldn’t. However, I can’t put the drivers on because I need the USB drivers first, and I can’t get those on as I have no floppy drive. I’ve added them to my pen drive for the Flash Floppy drive, but it’s not recognising that properly. It comes on, but Windows struggles to access it and gives up. I’ve tried adding it in the BIOS, but it gives me an error at boot, thinking there should be an actual floppy drive, and it still won’t load anything in Windows. On some occasions it thinks there’s a 5 1/4 drive when I actually selected 3 1/2.