Hard Drive Won't Boot and I Need Your Help!!!!

[SophiesDad]

Ok Fellow SysOpters,

Here's a good one for you techies.

I'm trying to load Win95 on a Maxtor 1.2gig hard drive in an old Gateway2000 4DX33 using a GSI Model 2C Dual-Channel Enhanced IDE Adapter Card. Does anyone remember these?

For those who don't know this allows you overcome capacity barriers that are common in older BIOS. It has its own BIOS Manager on the card.


Here's what I can do:

The GSI reconizes the drive.

I can FDISK the drive.

Although at first I received the error "Your Program caused a divide overflow error", when I disabled external cache, I can now FORMAT the drive and make it bootable, i.e FORMAT C: /S.

I can access the drive using a System Disk such as DIR.


Here what I can't do and hence my problem:

When I reboot the machine, the GSI BiosManager reconizes the drive. FYI, the Gateway BIOS drives types are set to NOT INSTALLED.

When the sytem looks at the HD, the HD light blinks and then the light stays on and the machine locks up. If I use a smaller drive I have no problems booting to it.

Am I missing something people? I would appreciate any tips you might have.

Thank You in advance.

[InfexusBytez]

Sounds like a bad media descripter. Try booting to a floppy, and running scandisk (thorough) on it. If it locks the system up, I'd label it a bad drive. Otherwise, may be something wrong with the IDE card.

The second really wouldn't suprise me. Those cards are probably a little old by now. Haven't made those in about 2-3 years or so, have they?