hard drive woes (limited Alfa content)

[Tess McMillan <tessmc@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Alfisti!

I'm having a crisis with my hard drive (the one I use for our newsletter
production) and I'm going to miss my deadline if I don't figure this out.
***Alfa content: Olive Oil acts like this all the time!***

I haven't been able to boot to or read from my HD, except intermittently I
am able to boot in DOS or safe mode (old Win95 machine, 100MHz Pentium
with 1GB IDE HD, IDE CD-ROM as slave). Usually I get the blue screen with
an error message - cannot read drive.

I bought a Fujitsu 4GB IDE (ATA) HD to set up as master (thinking I could
slave my old drive and pull the data off of it). I FDISKed into 2
partitions. I formatted the 2 volumes c:\ and d:\, and added system files
to c:.  BUT: I still couldn't boot from c:\!.

Also, when I've tried copying files from my old drive to c:\, or when I've
tried just installing MS-DOS, I get errors and the files on C:\ end up as
garbage. Looks like parts of files end up as parts of names, too. Plus,
the DOS install breaks with an error.

If any of you have a clue what the problem could be, please email me! This
has got to be simpler than replacing my steering wheel... And before you
say "chuck this machine and get a 400MHz PII!" remember: I'm a working
stiff, and I've got a deadline to meet!

Hope Santa was good to all of you! Richard, please don't boot me off the
list for this!

Tess

http://www.halcyon.com/tessmc/  
http://members.tripod.com/~Rainier_Agility_Team/  

------------------------------