missing hard drive icons

grokv · Oct 18, 2003

I am in the process of putting together a new P4 system. I temporarily installed Win98SE (because it was handy and I was too lazy to find my XP disk) just to test the primary disk (WD 80GB), and I temporarily put two other formatted, known good hard disks (with data on them) on the system (after verifying that everything else worked). After installing the disks, the BIOS verifies that the disks are present, the Windows device manager verifies that the disks are present and functioning properly -- but no disk icons other than the primary C drive and D (cd rom) are present under "My Computer." The system is acting as if the disks are unformatted, yet putting the disks in another Win98SE system verifies that the disks are indeed good.

Any hints?

I realize that this is a dead OS, but my curiosity is piqued -- I also manage a couple of labs for a music school and have not run into this problem before.

SNGX1275 · Oct 18, 2003

Are they formatted as NTFS? If so Windows98 won't notice them.

grokv · Oct 19, 2003

The drives are formatted as FAT32 -- I just wanted to dump the data from these two drives to another disk. I may just put them back in an old box and shovel it by ethernet, but this seemed (so I thought) faster.......

Phantasm66 · Oct 19, 2003

They may have been converted from "basic disks" to "dynamic disks" under Windows XP or 2000, in which case I think that Windows 98 will not see them.

There should be no problem whatsoever with Win9x reading FAT32 formatted volumes otherwise, and assigning a drive letter to them.

The system is acting as if the disks are unformatted, yet putting the disks in another Win98SE system verifies that the disks are indeed good.
Click to expand...

Does this mean that the other win9x system gives the drives drive letters? In that case, the above from me is probably wrong, and something weird is happening....

In any case, get WinXP back on your system and stop worrying about Win9x. I know that my life has got a lot better since I did.

grokv · Oct 19, 2003

These disks have never seen 2000 or XP. They came straight from a legacy Win98 machine, where they had drive letters. To re-confirm that they still worked, I reinstalled them on the legacy machine -- everything works ok, drive letters assigned as expected.

At any rate, I am just shoving the drives back into the old box and sending the data over by ethernet. And then good riddance W98.

So much for saving time.

Thank you all for your help.

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missing hard drive icons

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