Win 2K not booting / HD not recognized

Okay, I'm having issues with my OS. It's a bit long, so please bare with me. Questions are numbered on the bottom.


So my computer had Win 98SE (English) & Win 2K (Japanese) installed. I have two physical HD, with 98 installed in C:\ (my IBM HD) & 2K installed in D:\ (Western Digital HD).
Last week, my 2K OS crashed, I think it was after I upgraded to SP4, but I'm not sure.

When I rebooted, the computer failed to recognize my master (IBM) drive, so I couldn't start up. I swapped the HD and made my WD into master, and now it recognized the IBM, but not the WD. Lastly, I plugged in the IBM by itself, and it recognized it as master. I double-checked the jumper settings when I did this.

I restarted the computer, and the computer wouldn't restart properly (some error about system files not found, I don't recall), so I reinstalled Win2k (bad move?). The computer reinstalled, all the data was intact, which was a bit of relief. I reinstalled my drivers, updated from windows update. I had a problem with boot-up where I'd see 3-OSes, two for Win2K & one for Win98. The other two options don't work (my WD HD is not hooked up) at all.

However, after I upgraded to SP4 & I installed PQ Magic 7 (dunno which is the problem), the 2K would hang whenever I would load. I didn't set anything in PQ7 so, I don't think that's the problem, so I think it has to do with SP4 and something with my hardware. So here are my questions:

1. What should I do from here? Should I do a clean reinstall? I don't mind losing data from my HD, but I'd like to salvage it if possible.

2. How do I get rid of those past OS-es that show up during boot-up? Any help would be great.

3. Is the phenomenon of the motherboard not recognizing the master HD (when there are two HDs installed) related to my motherboard? Can I fix it?

Any help would be great. Thanks in advance!

try another ide cable, make sure your jumpers are correct as master and slave. not master /single and slave ect....make the boot disk set for partition magic, if you dont allready have it, completely remove all partition and erase both drives,drop in your 2k disk, set your partitions and format with it, reinstall and see if you are better.

the thing is, partition magic doesn't see the partitions, but I win2k does, even the invalid ones. How do I fix that?

not sure if i follow correctly but if u r booting it will show the 3 os?but only two r installed?....boot win98 up[ and edit the boot.ini file.as far as win2k hanging is it after log in?does it say one or more drivers/services failed to load?if so go to event viewer and find what exactly hung.on both my pcs i had to diable web and smtp services.also u can put both hd on cable select....the last one would then be master and the second slave

Your first step should be to download the ibm and wd drive utilities. Put your drives back like there were with ibm as master and wd as slave. Test the drives with the software from boot diskette. Replace the ide cable with a known good one.

It sounds like you ibm drive lost its ability to properly address the wd drive or they decided to no longer be compatable drives.

Usual solution for this is to put each as master on their own ide channel.

You never want to muddy the waters with adding software utilities like Partition Magic to the mix. Your issue was not partitions, which is what PM works with, but drive addressing between drives and the bios.

If you have played with creating multiple partitions and wish to remove them then reinstalling W2K is a good idea.

In answer to your questions:

1. You could do a reinstall or you could learn about and use Recovery Console.

2. Unless you installed to a different folder each time than the default winnt folder, those OS entries all point to the same W2K install. Remove the excess entries from the hidden Boot.ini file at the root of c:

3. I would suspect it was a conflict between drives that caused the bios not to recognize the drives. If there was a problem with your motherboard ide controller there is no way for you to fix it. Return or replace the mainboard if this were the case.

It was never clear if you went back to your original drive configuration after the swap.