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 2025-10-17, 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 2025-10-17, 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 2025-10-17, 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.

Okay, managed to get my FlashFloppy drive working properly in Windows again, installed the USB drivers, and put on Ghost. Just about to create my first image state. Are there any settings I should enable first? And should the image be saved as an 'IMG' file? Or 'GHO'? Or does it not really matter?

DustyShinigami wrote on 2025-10-17, 19:10:

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.

Is the error you're getting something like "Floppy disks fail" at boot, and then it hangs? That happens when the BIOS can't talk to the floppy drive. Check that your floppy drive cable is connected properly, its orientation matters. If the drive or board connectors don't have a key tab, you can put it in the wrong way.

The drive being detected as 5 1/4 would point to some sort of BIOS corruption. Windows queries the BIOS to determine the floppy drive type. You might want to check the battery on your board and replace it if it's empty. I've had that problem happen before and it was solved with a new battery.

About the hard drive not getting detected, is that the 80 GB one? I found a couple of threads online that mention you have to update the BIOS of your HPT controller to v1.28. That would probably be done by updating your board's BIOS to the newest version.

Check these two threads:
https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic325789.html
https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic325679.html

Edit: Okay, according to those, it seems to be a bit more involved than that. You'd have to use a BIOS editor to replace the HPT module with the newer 1.28 version. Before you do that, try to determine what your current HPT BIOS version is, it will probably show that on its boot screen. If it's 1.25, this might be your problem.

asdf53 wrote on 2025-10-19, 01:24:

Is the error you're getting something like "Floppy disks fail" at boot, and then it hangs? That happens when the BIOS can't talk […]
Show full quote

DustyShinigami wrote on 2025-10-17, 19:10:

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.

Is the error you're getting something like "Floppy disks fail" at boot, and then it hangs? That happens when the BIOS can't talk to the floppy drive. Check that your floppy drive cable is connected properly, its orientation matters. If the drive or board connectors don't have a key tab, you can put it in the wrong way.

The drive being detected as 5 1/4 would point to some sort of BIOS corruption. Windows queries the BIOS to determine the floppy drive type. You might want to check the battery on your board and replace it if it's empty. I've had that problem happen before and it was solved with a new battery.

About the hard drive not getting detected, is that the 80 GB one? I found a couple of threads online that mention you have to update the BIOS of your HPT controller to v1.28. That would probably be done by updating your board's BIOS to the newest version.

Check these two threads:
https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic325789.html
https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic325679.html

Edit: Okay, according to those, it seems to be a bit more involved than that. You'd have to use a BIOS editor to replace the HPT module with the newer 1.28 version. Before you do that, try to determine what your current HPT BIOS version is, it will probably show that on its boot screen. If it's 1.25, this might be your problem.

Yeah, it says 'floppy disks fail' and then '(40)'. It gives me the option to press F1 to continue anyway. If I have it so it's just Floppy Drive B (the Gotek), I swear I was still getting the error before, but now I don't. But it still detects it as 5 1/4 in Windows. But yeah, I've disconnected and re-connected a lot, so I've made super sure it's in right. 😀 I did buy some more batteries just the other day actually, so I'll try replacing it and see.

And yep, it's the 80GB drive. The HPT BIOS only recognises it as 10. I had to use the SeaGate Tool for DOS, I think, to correctly set the right capacity. I believe I updated its BIOS before, so I presume that's still the same one now. The version it was updated to is, indeed, 1.25. ^^; Is using a BIOS editor to replace it complicated?

Anyway, I made my first image state last night. I just saved it as a GHO. I presume there's no downside for using compression...? I didn't, but have been considering it if it frees space.

I'm going to have another go today at installing the sound card and drivers and see what happens. I'm also currently looking into updating the HPT BIOS driver. According to the sticker on my ISA bus, my motherboard is 1.1.

Still a bit unsure regarding the HPT BIOS at the moment, but I've put the Sound Blaster back in and it's detected it fine. What I need though are the right drivers. I'm 100% certain the ones I was trying before aren't right. I get the impression they're just for the standard Audigy...? I do have an Audigy 2 update, but not the actual driver, which I need to find.

DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 17:41:

Still a bit unsure regarding the HPT BIOS at the moment, but I've put the Sound Blaster back in and it's detected it fine. What I need though are the right drivers. I'm 100% certain the ones I was trying before aren't right. I get the impression they're just for the standard Audigy...? I do have an Audigy 2 update, but not the actual driver, which I need to find.

Someone described the process here: https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic297972.html#1641861

You need:
- ABIT BIOS file for your board: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/abit-ab-be6-ii#bios
- HPT BIOS 1.28 https://soggi.org/storage/highpoint.htm
- CBROM. The poster in the thread used cbrom215.exe, available here: https://archive.org/download/bnobtc_bntbtc/bn … %2FCBROM215.EXE

Process:
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /D
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /pci hpt_bios.bin
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /D

The /D commands are just to verify the pre- and post-modification state.

The resulting abit_bios.bin must then be flashed to your board using Awdflash.

Needless to say, it's at on your own risk. Make sure you have the correct versions for your board.

What I noticed though is that the forum post mentions removing the old HPT bios first, but he doesn't actually do that in his command sequence. If you were to include that step, it would be:

CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /D
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /pci release
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /D (PCI module is now gone)
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /pci hpt_bios.bin
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /D

I can't tell you if this is required or not, it's been a long time since I last used this.

But in that thread, the PCI rom doubled in size after the insertion, that doesn't seem right. Seems as if it was just added on top of the old HPT bios. All other sources I could find that use the /pci switch seem to use /release before, so I'd probably do that.

asdf53 wrote on Yesterday, 18:09:

Someone described the process here: https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic297972.html#1641861 […]
Show full quote

DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 17:41:

Still a bit unsure regarding the HPT BIOS at the moment, but I've put the Sound Blaster back in and it's detected it fine. What I need though are the right drivers. I'm 100% certain the ones I was trying before aren't right. I get the impression they're just for the standard Audigy...? I do have an Audigy 2 update, but not the actual driver, which I need to find.

Someone described the process here: https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic297972.html#1641861

You need:
- ABIT BIOS file for your board: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/abit-ab-be6-ii#bios
- HPT BIOS 1.28 https://soggi.org/storage/highpoint.htm
- CBROM. The poster in the thread used cbrom215.exe, available here: https://archive.org/download/bnobtc_bntbtc/bn … %2FCBROM215.EXE

Process:
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /D
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /pci hpt_bios.bin
CBROM215.EXE abit_bios.bin /D

The /D commands are just to verify the pre- and post-modification state.

The resulting abit_bios.bin must then be flashed to your board using Awdflash.

Needless to say, it's at on your own risk. Make sure you have the correct versions for your board.

Thanks. That link/download is different from the one I found from the linked thread I posted in the thread I made today.

That only goes up to 1.26. How come the DOS one is higher?

I think the guy I bought the motherboard from said it has the latest BIOS on, but I need to double check that. I know I had some struggles with updating the BIOS on my other mobo. I think it was a specific version of CBROM I had to use.

Also, I downloaded the drivers that are supposedly for my sound card. They're for the Audigy 2. Everything was looking promising; really thought I'd cracked it. Restarted the PC and it seems to hang for ages with a blank desktop and mouse cursor. When it did eventually load everything up, there's still no audio. It still can't detect a Sound Blaster device, despite it being listed in the HQMixer and the Device Manager. 🙁 I really don't know where or which are the right drivers for this thing. It makes no sense.

Those are Windows drivers, not BIOS files. The HPT BIOS is a single binary file with a size of around 25 kb. It's a bit confusing because the drivers share the same version numbers with the BIOS.

You mentioned that your controller BIOS says 1.25 at boot, so even if your motherboard BIOS is up to date, the controller's isn't so far.

Regarding the sound card, I'd suggest trying it with the HPT controller disabled in BIOS and your drives connected to IDE1 and IDE2. If that doesn't help, test the card in your other motherboard if possible, to determine if it's damaged or if it's just a driver issue.

You don't even have to reinstall Windows 98. Just use the same hard drive on your other board, boot into Windows, delete device manager using registry, re-detect hardware. Later, transfer the hard drive back to the Abit board and repeat the process.