WD 13.6 drive install problem

[ChevyGa]

I am trying to install a WD 13.6g drive in a HP7280 Pavillion. The problem I have is using Norton utilities on it. It reports that the drive is not configured correctly. It reports (when booted in safe mode) "An extended partition is invalid". Since the BIOS does not recognize over a 2.1g drive EZ-drive was installed. If I save anything on the E,F,G,H or I drive ,everything slows down to a crawl. If I boot to dos and run Fdisk, it reports that the total disk space is 1295 Mbytes. When I look at the Logical DOS drive info it shows 5 drives of 2047 Mbytes and 1 675 Mbyte drive. Below that it says total disk space is 1295 Mbytes. I know this is wrong but what do I do? Do I need to delete the extended Dos partition with Fdisk and redo it? All the original data from the old HD is on C drive and works just fine until I put something on a drive above E. Help me please..I'm stumped.

[Underclocked]

HP7280 sounds like a newer model Pavillion. Why did you have to install EZ drive? I would remove EZ drive and simply use fdisk to partition as needed.

[ChevyGa]

No this is definitely an older model P-166. It came with only 16meg of ram (upgraded to 64) The BIOS date is 4/11/96. It is also running win95 ver A(FAT16) so there is the 2.1gig limitation. I don't have a copy of ver b and did not want to put win98 on it. It is slow enough already and was told win98 would make it crawl even worse. Any other ideas...

[This message has been edited by ChevyGa (edited 07-04-2000).]

[jad1097]

There is a BIOS update available for you here. (http://www.hp.com/cposupport/personal_computing/software/r1_1007u.exe.html) I am not sure if it will fix your BIOS limitation but it is dated 05-Feb-1997. Actually it is for HP Pavilion Models 7270, 7275Z, 7280P, 7285, and 7295V only.

How are you booting into dos? If you are using a floppy you need to let ezbios load first then select to boot from A:.

I would also upgrade to fat32 with either win95b,c or 98. Someone here could most likely sell you an old copy they have for a reasonable price. That way you won't have so many paritions.


As for the reason it runs so slow and misreporting the sizes I am not sure.



[This message has been edited by jad1097 (edited 07-04-2000).]

[Nathan]

I wouldn't worry about having 98 installed on your hard drive and slowing things down. I have a 200MHZ machine that had 95B on it. I reformatted it and installed 98 on it. I didn't notice it being any slower. The only thing I would find out is if HP has the 98 drivers for that model you have.

The link below is to the drivers page.

http://www.hp.com/cposupport/swindexes/pv7280p_swen.html