All I am trying to do is copy some data off an 8 gig bigfoot drive, onto another drive so I can use a stripped down old PC thats generally falling apart as a linux box to do some development and testing on. it really shouldn't be too much to ask for.
I had another go at my preparation the other day. I managed to get windows 98 to boot of my ide 1 primary hardrive, with the bigfoot as priamry on ide 2, and a cdrom as secondary on ide 2. This works consideralby better than trying to boot off windows 95 on the bigfoot, as 98 recognises the cd without any worries.
The first problem I notice is that the PS2 mouse causes a conflict with the seconary IDE controller. So, I need to use a serial mouse insead, and disable the PS2 port. Apart from I don't have a serial port - as the socket on the case had fallen off due to the screws no longer holding. So I manage to dig out the motherboard to serial port cable ( its an old AMD K62 motherboard so on board sockets were a bit ahead of its time. ) Once connected the mouse still didn't work - I had turned it off in the bios when I unplugged the cable last time. So, after several more reboots I finally manage to get the serial mouse working, and resolve the conflict with the hardrive.
So now I can see the hardrive in system in control panel, but not as a drive. It doesn't seem to have a letter. So then I run Fdisk. The drive is apparently one lump of data, with no partitions.
Then, casting my mind back to when my machine was a mere P75 I remember the last time I had an issue recognising this self same drive, when I installed Ontrack to get around bios limitations. Looking at the maxtor website it looks like this might be the source of my worries. So now I have to find a way of removing it. Not too sure if just blasting the mbr is the best way fowards so I might see if I can dig up a copy of ontrack on floppy, and see if I can find a floppy drive to bung into this box. It is becming apparent to me that it would have been more efficient to get a second job and just buy a pc to use as a dev box from the income.
