Do you have another machine you could stick the DOS HDD in? If it does the same thing, then maybe try fdisk /mbr.

Do you mean you have both drives *connected* as primary master at the same time?? That's a recipe for disaster. That means the microdrive has to electrically overpower the signal from the IDE drive, and when the command comes to write some data onto the Windows microdrive, the command will be directed at *both* drives, possibly overwriting some data on your DOS IDE drive as well.

I'm guessing that's what happened and the DOS drive has gotten to the point where it is corrupted enough that it won't boot. You'll probably have to boot from a floppy with the same DOS version and run "sys c:" to restore the boot files. "fdisk /mbr" may help too, it just depends where the corruption is. That might get the system to boot, but you might also have to reinstall other things on the drive as well.

First thing you should probably do is set the DOS/IDE one to be the secondary master (it'll still show up as drive C: if there is no primary master present) or if you only have one IDE channel, set them up as primary master and primary slave, and set up a proper boot menu so you can dual boot.

Thanks to both of you. I'll be trying a few things today. I def thought of "fdisk /mbr" but how can I even get to that point? If I use the DOS install disks and booted from them, would that do it?

Re: the IDE config, yes, I know it's not ideal, although didn't realize the risk that was mentioned. I'll def try the DOS drive on the secondary master to see if that does it. For some reason, I remember this being the only way it would work, outside of doing a dual boot. I looked into doing a dual boot, but found a lot of people mentioning issues and lots of varying opinions on how to do it. Since I had the ability to simply eject the Microdrive, I decided to just do it this way. Can you recommend a good way to set up the dual boot?

I may end up re-formatting the DOS drive anyway, as for some reason, I couldn't get the max logical drives out of it. BIOS etc. sees the full 8GB max, but I could only get the primary 2GB and one extended 2GB partition out of it. When I'm in FDISK, it says that there is already an extended DOS partition and that all logical drives are assigned. I'd love to be able to get the full four logical drives out of it.

NooNaN wrote:

Thanks to both of you. I'll be trying a few things today. I def thought of "fdisk /mbr" but how can I even get to that point? If I use the DOS install disks and booted from them, would that do it?

1 - Boot with MS-Dos installer disk in the floppydrive.
2 - When it tells you that it is loading MS-Dos, press "F5", as this bypasses the Config files. (or press F3 within the Dos installer)
3 - At the Dos prompt, type in "FDISK /MBR". Dos will write a new master boot record.
4 - Reboot the system without disks in the floppy drive.
5 - If the problem is not solved, then load fdisk the normal way and check for "Active partitions".
6 - If none are set as/to active then choose "Activate partition" and reboot yet again without disks in the floppy drive.
7 - If none has solved the issue, try with a new harddisk or something similair.

OK, so I fixed the DOS install issue. I believe that I was formatting with /s in a Windows environment, so it didn't want to install DOS. Past all that, I've reinstalled my AWE 64 Gold drivers in DOS. For some reason, the right channel only isn't working in the diagnostics. When I run MIDI, it works fine, so I know it's all wired up correctly without any breaks. Just seems like the right channel out of the back of the AWE isn't outputting. I didn't have this issue at all before all this.

Have any of you experienced this or have any ideas?

Sorry, just adding a quick post to bump a bit as I edited a bunch of times...

Reg. Multibooting Windows 98se and Dos 6.22

You can set the drives as master / slave , but then use plop boot manager on the boot drive to select between the drives when booting.

2GB is the Fat16 Limitation, its normal 😀

You can even use plop to do Windows 98se and Dos on the same drive by partitioning it, with 3 Primary fat16 partitions , and finally a Fat32 Primary partition last for the rest of the drive , then install plop, and configure it, followed by installing dos then windows 98.

Huh, thanks. Hadn't heard of Plop before. Will look into it for sure. I didn't think of going FAT32 on the same drive, but makes sense. I do now have all the partitions and logical drives right. I won't have a ton in Windows, so the 4GB Microdrive should serve me well.

The right channel issue is just a bad connection at the back of the sound card. Too bad, but I've got it stable now.

Thanks again!