Need help with a really OLD Dell

[Bill in SD, CA]

My son brought his girlfriend's Dell (1993 vintage) for me to work on and I figured what the hey. (love my son)

Running 98 FE and really cluttered up with a lot of crap and all she wants it for is word processing for school work.

Has a 3 gig drive with 2 partitions - C & D. (Dell thing I guess)

It does work BTW. Not even an MMX pentium.

AT - 5 ISA 3 PCI (one shared) Haven't seen one of these in a long while.

I figured I would wipe everything out - fdisk to one partition and format and install a 98 SE I have laying around that I don't use anymore.

Problem is when I use the bootdisk I can't access the C:\ or D:\ drives with fdisk.

Can't change directories from the A:\ prompt to C:\ or D:\.

Is this a Dell thing or am I obviously doing something wrong?

Bill

Originally posted by Bill in SD, CA
Is this a Dell thing or am I obviously doing something wrong?

Bill

You really want my guess?

What does it tell you when you try to FDISK?
What bootdisk are you using? Have you tried a different one?

[Bill in SD, CA]

Originally posted by EvilRick


You really want my guess?

Rick, that's cold man.

This is what fdisk displays:

Current fixed disk drive: 1

Part 1: Status: A, Type: non-dos, Mbytes: 2047, Usage: 100%

Part 2: Status: N/A, Type: non-dos, Mbytes: 4809, Usage: 100%

Using original 98SE floppy, and 2 different floppies from bootdisk.com.

Same result from all 3 three except I do get asked to insert the 98 CD in the drive and then even that fails.

Bill

Hmm, doesn't even look like it has a 3GB HDD. Looks more like a 6GB or two different ones.

Does it boot into 98? Are you sure it has 98 on it? Usually "Non-DOS" is NTFS or something that FDISK doesn't recognize like *nix.

Since you're getting rid of it anyway, have you tried 'Delete Non-DOS Partition'?

Check and make sure they haven't manually setup the HDD's C/H/S and set it to autodetect.

[Gettinbye]

You said it's a 3g drive with 2 partitions? Looks like DOS is seeing a (roughly) 6.8g drive. Makes me wonder if the partition table has gone to the dark side. You can put the HDD in another computer as a second HDD to try to diagnose it with a working O/S-a partition utility such as PM would show any inconsistancies in the partition tables.
Have you tried running scandisk from the 98 floppy? Perhaps the HDD itself is going...

[Foggy]

Most of the Dell's that old used WD HDD's, have you tried WD's Utility disk?

[Bill in SD, CA]

OK, tried to select "auto" in BIOS and the computer hung.

Thought I killed it.

Disconnected the HDD and was finallly able to get back in the BIOS.

Typed in "user" settings and noticed that it doesn't accept what I typed in.

Maxtor Diagnostics don't work. Drive age maybe?

Here are the stettings on the drive:

Cyl: 13957, Heads: 16, Sect: 63

When inputted as user only "3957" shows for Cyl.

Drive too big for BIOS?

Also just discovered that I have a "3rd." drive in Explorer.

Drives listed are C - 2.69 GB, D - 1.99 GB, and E - 1.99 GB.

Different files on each drive.

Only 1 HDD.

Bill

Have you tried jumpering it to Slave and putting it in another machine?

What's the model # on the HDD?

[Bill in SD, CA]

90720D5 - Maxtor

Slaving it is an option on my W2K machine.

I may just suggest "S"-canning the machine.

It's a P90 with 80 mb of RAM.

But still ............ the challenge of beating this is still there.

Bill

Originally posted by Bill in SD, CA
90720D5 - Maxtor

Then WD's software isn't going to work on it.

Use PowerMax instead.