Question : Problem: Only Dos doesn't recognize new hard drive

I've got a new Maxtor Fireball 3 hard drive that was a warranty replacement. I want to use it to store backup images and data. Therefore I want to be able to access it from dos in the event of an OS failure. The problem is that this hard drive just does not exist as far as Dos is concerned. Even if it is the only drive in the computer jumpered as master or CS. The odd thing is that Windows XP has no issues with the drive and reports it as one healthy 40g primary FAT32 partition. The drive is reported on the bios generated startup screen as the correct drive, whether set as master slave or whatever. I've tried WindowsXP, Me, and 98SE generated system diskettes to no avail. If I run fdisk, the error reported is "can't access drive 1." If I try to switch to the drive letter at the dos prompt, say c: if it is the only drive in the box, the error is "invalid drive specification."

After much trial and error, I put the drive in another computer and booted to DOS using the same boot disk I had just used on the suspect system. Also Athlon cpu, but different motherboard. Bingo, there was the drive, as it should be.

So I guess I have a motherboard - drive incompatibility, or bios setting problem? The motherboard in question is an ECS k7vta3. But if that is the case, then why is it only in Dos that the drive is invisible? Do I need some driver to make it see Dos? I couldn't find any reference to this problem on the ECS web site.

Maxtor support was no help. They washed their hands of the problem once they established it was working correctly in Windows XP.

Any ideas?

Esteban

Answer : Problem: Only Dos doesn't recognize new hard drive

You haven't set this to be a dynamic disk in XP's disk management, have you?
I'd say start off by upgrading your BIOS...