Comments: Hard Drives & Disappearing Hardware
by William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
Hard Drives
Last month I wrote about buying a second hard drive, a 5.1 GB Western Digital drive for $279. Recall that I detailed what a bargain such things are now compared to, say, five years ago. But, as is to be expected when buying computer hardware, you can now get the same drive $50 cheaper. For those who haven't installed a drive or who can't recall the exact process, I will describe the installation of the drive.
First, let me say that I am not totally dumb. I bought the drive several days before I completed the January newsletter, and, even though I was sure that the installation would be completed without a problem, I restrained myself and waited until the newsletter was completed until I did the installation. This was not a bad choice, since what I was sure would be a 45 minute operation lasted probably three hours.
Second, some hard drive facts. If you use Windows 95--and it is not Windows 95 OSR2 (OEM Service Release 2)--then you are using the standard FAT file system, as opposed to the FAT 32 file system. If you are using Windows 95 OSR2, you may or may not be using FAT 32 . As I understand it, you can only get Windows 95 OSR2 on new computer systems--you can not go to a store and buy it. Furthermore, even if you purchase a new computer with Windows 95 OSR2 installed, unless it came from Gateway, you probably are not using the FAT 32 file system, since Dell, Compaq, and Micron, as far as I can tell, are not enabling the FAT 32 option--probably since they don't want to deal with the extra customer support it would entail. In fact, if you, on your own, change to the FAT 32 file system, you may lose your free support from these companies.
So, why would one want to have FAT 32? Simply because it overcomes the DOS/Windows limitations of a maximum hard drive size of 2.1 GB, allowing drives of up to 2 terabytes, and it has smaller clusters of size 4 KB on drives smaller than 8 MB. Recall that a few years back we had a maximum hard drive size of around 500 MB since our computers’ BIOS wouldn't support anything larger. The hard drive manufacturers came up with software programs, called overlays, to trick the BIOS into using the full capacity of the newer hard drives up to the 2.1 GB limit.
Now, back to my situation. I already had a 2.5 GB drive divided into a 2.1 GB partition and a .4 KGB partition, and there would be nothing to gain by making the new drive my master drive, since under my version of Windows 95 I could have partitions no larger than 2.1 GB. Thus, I would install the new 5.1 GB drive as the slave drive. To do this, you simply set the jumpers on each drive to the positions indicated in the instructions--the old drive is the master and the new drive is the slave.
Next, comes the physical installation of the new drive into the computer. The current drive was mounted vertically, instead of horizontally as in older systems. However, the obvious place to mount the new drive was in one of the horizontal drive bay openings, as I had done with the half dozen or so drives I have installed over the years. That created my first problem. There was no drive bay close enough to the existing hard drive for the cabling to work. Some thought led to the conclusion that I should try to mount the new drive vertically next to the existing drive. It was a tight fit, but it worked. Now my only problem was to install the four screws holding it in place--with only an inch of clearance above and below. This was too little room for a standard screwdriver, but with the aid of a pair of needle nose pliers holding each screw and a small right angle screwdriver doing the turning I finally got it secured. By now I was well past my allotted 45 minutes.
The next step is to turn on your computer and,when it begins to boot, go into the BIOS setup. On these modern computers, all you need do is make sure that for the new hard drive you select auto configuration, and you are on your way. Recall the old days when you had to select the drive type or know the number of cylinders, etc. Once the BIOS is set correctly then you can continue with the boot. Western Digital's instructions now said that I should use their EZ-Drive setup Software to partition and format my new drive. I said, why not. In the past I had always used the DOS program FDISK to partition the new drives and then FORMAT to format the drives. But why not use EZ-Drive and not have to think?
Well, I had to start thinking real fast. The first message I got was that my computer's BIOS didn't support large hard drives and that EZ-Drive would like to install EZ-BIOS to overcome that. That sounded a lot like a disk overlay to me--something I didn't want and didn't need--since at present I already had a drive installed with a 2.1 GB partition--the largest that DOS/Windows allows. Perhaps EZ-BIOS was going to make it possible for me to have a 5.1 GB partition. I don't know and didn't find out.
I could now go back to the tried and true FDISK and FORMAT; however, as many of you did at one of our meetings, I had purchased PartitionMagic 3.0 from the PowerQuest representative and--probably just like many of you--hadn't yet used it. I had used PartitionMagic 2.0 to remove a Windows NT NTFS partition from a drive that used to be an NT drive but was now a Win 95 drive—when no other method could be found to remove it. As Don Patzsch keeps saying, PartitionMagic is a useful program. I just don't get as much excitement as he does from resizing my partitions every so often when I get bored.
Anyway, I installed the new version of PartitionMagic, didn't bother to read the instructions and created three primary FAT partitions. Unfortunately two of them turned out to be Hidden Partitions. What had I done wrong? It had been over a year since I had partitioned a hard drive, and I had forgotten that you are allowed only one active (visible) primary partition--as a reading of the PartitionMagic manual would have disclosed. Back to the drawing boards. I removed the two extra primary partitions. That left me with one primary FAT partition of 2.1 MB. I then created an extended partition using all the remaining disk space. Inside that extended partition, I created two logical partitions of sizes 2.1 GB and .9 GB. By the way, PartitionMagic automatically formats the partitions when you create them. I was finished
There was, however, one surprise left. I had forgotten how DOS names your hard drives. Before I installed the new drive I had logical drives C & D on the original Drive, and my CD-ROM drive was E and the ZIP drive was M. After installing the additional drive, I had C and E on the original drive and D, F, and G on the new drive; the CD drive was now H, and the Zip was still M. A graphical description of this is at the bottom of the column. Luckily the PartitionMagic CD has a program called, I believe, Drive Mapper which goes through all your INI files and the Windows 95 registry looking for all instances of old drive letters and makes the appropriate changes. For example, I had it map old drive E to new drive H for my CD. I didn't have it map the old D drive to the new drive E, since, everything there being data, I just moved it to the new drive D. I have had to install only two programs that couldn't adjust to the change. Drive Mapper apparently correctly changed the drive information for the rest of my programs.
I recommend PartitonMagic as an easy way of accomplishing the above since it provides a graphical interface for the process.
Lost Hardware
This past month I have turned on my computer and found on three different occasions that
The first thing one should do on such an occasion is not panic. Stop and think and consider your options. In reading messages in the Usenet Newsgroups, I notice that people quite often reinstall Windows when they have the slightest problem. I don’t recommend that—or the more extreme method of reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling everything—until you have exhausted other less destructive solutions.
Quite often when it is a hardware problem you either have an IRQ or address conflict with another hardware item. Windows 95 makes it fairly easy to check that out, which you do by going to Control Panel | System | Device Manager and looking at the properties of the particular—your sound card, for example. My problems were not conflicts, though.
When I noticed the microphone didn’t work, my first thought was a bad connection, then a bad microphone. Checking to see if it was plugged in and then trying a different microphone didn’t help. Checking that it was not muted and the volume level was not zero in the multimedia volume control program did not help. Win 95 also said that the sound card was functioning properly—and it was for output—just not microphone input. The solution that worked was to, from the Device Manager, remove all mention of the sound card, reboot and let Windows find the sound card again. It worked.
In the past, occasionally I had noted that my Zip drive would not be listed in My Computer or Windows Explorer. A simple reboot of the computer always brought it back. This time, however, nothing produced any mention of the Zip drive. Again I checked all connections; everything was tight. Using the utility Tweak UI, I checked that I hadn’t mistakenly set the Zip Drive not to show. There was no listing of the Zip in Tweak UI; it couldn’t find it either. So it really was not there. I got out my Zip installation disk and reinstalled it. It was back, and has functioned perfectly for the past week.
Several days after missing my Zip drive, I tried to scan in a document for OCR using TextBridge Pro and the program went into suspension (an hourglass forever). It apparently got confused when trying to find my scanner, since I discovered that, when trying to run my scanning software, I would get the message that I had no scanner installed. I checked the Win 95 Device Manager. It listed my scanner and said that it was functioning properly—apparently Win 95 does not yet know everything. Again, the obvious solution was to remove the device from Win 95 and reinstall.
Before doing this, though, I had an idea. Even though my Zip drive uses a parallel interface, it installs a SCSI controller. Could this controller be conflicting with the SCSI controller for my HP scanner? To check this idea, I removed the Zip drive from the Windows setup, unplugged the Zip drive, and rebooted. Still no scanner. So much for that idea. I then reinstalled my Zip drive, removed the scanner from the Device Manager, and did a manual reinstall of it using its installation disks (Windows will not automatically find the scanner).
Everything was back to normal. I have no idea why my hardware disappeared. Possibly things like this happen when your computer freezes while doing something crucial. Or maybe it is a right wing conspiracy. u