Fatal Error Installing Hard Drive

Question

I have a Dell GX1 350. I bought a Western Digital 30GB hard drive and am trying to install it as a slave drive. I am running Windows 98. I recently upgraded the BOIS to A10 from the Dell site. I thought this would solve my problem.   When booting from the floppy provided by Western Digital and running the WD setup routine I get this message toward the end:   Fatal Error Although the boot track was successfully created, partioning of Drive 2 failed because backing up the new boot track failed because there was a device error reading drive 2 absolute sector 58633343 Count 1   The WD setup utility allows you to test the BIOS. A test of the BIOS reported the following for both the old and new drive: BIOS is properly controlling this drive in LBA mode   When I go into the BIOS under Drives, it show this for the drive(my primary drive is Drive 0): Drive 1: Auto EIDE Drive 30020   When I boot up and use Windows Explorer it shows the drive as my D: drive. When I try to access it I get a message saying the drive is not accessible.   I have taken drives out of computers and switched them around before but this is my first attempt to install a new hard drive.   Any help would be very much appreciated.   Thank you, Omar

peterfelgate_ce40d3 · Answer

The GX1 doesn't like master or slave settings on IDE devices.  Jumper the drive for cable select.  Set the drives present to AUTO in the bios - any drives not present set to NONE.  Boot and go into the bios to make sure the drive(s) are correctly detected.  Then try installing your software/OS.

peterfelgate_ce40d3 · Answer

I'd forget about the Western Digital software which seems to causing you problems.

Just use a Win98 boot disk to fdisk and format the drive.

Message Edited by peterfelgate on 03-12-200503:16 PM

Message Edited by peterfelgate on 03-12-2005 03:16 PM

omar350 · Answer

Sorry I accidently sent it before completion.

Drive: Cyl Heads Sectors/Tracks Tot Sectors Capacity

Default 16383 16 63 58633344=MaxLBA 30020

Current 16383 16 63 16514064=MaxC*H*S 8455

Int 46 Physical 16383 16 63 16514064=C*H*S 8455

Int 46 Logical 1024 255 63 16450560=C*H*S 8422

Reg Int 13 1023 255 63 16434495=C*H*S 8414

Extended Int 13 16383 16 63 58633344 30020

On the first drive the Total Swctors and Capacity columns change very little as you go down the list. On this drive they change substantially.

Thank you for responding to my request for help. Any ideas on why I am still getting the same result as when I had the jumpers configured to have one the master and the new drive the slave?

Omar

omar350 · Answer

I tried changing the jumpers as suggested. I got the exact same result.

I should mention that prior to reading your reply this morning I powered up, right clicked on the drive, and selected format. Windows fromatted the drive. I did a scan disk and received no errors.

After changing the jumpers I ran the Western Digital software again, The result was the same. I received the same message that the boot track was successfully created but the partitioning failed.

A BIOS check in the WD setup utility showed the following (this didn't change after the jumpers were changed):

Drive: Cylinders Heads

Storage, Drives & Media

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