[cybermom]

This question is probably VERY complicated or so simple I can't see the obvious answer for myself. My niece inherited this equipment from another family member and it needs help.
The problem is this:
One old model of Compaq 5404 has TWO 2 Ghz hard drives, with three drive letters. The third is for all that neat stuff that Compaq feels is necessary. This computer has 42 MB of memory.. It has been working, but lately has begun to have many problems including (but not the only one) a shell32.dll internal error. The 'offical' MS q&a did not fix this either.

I feel that many of the gremlins started once I scandisked and defragged this unit. It has not been done in a little over 800 days. :dead: I am unable to access very little since they took over.


The harddrives are jumpered correctly as a Master and Slave on the same IDE channel. Once I fdisk and reformat, then install Win98 will it handle accessing the drives or do I have to do something in order for that to happen? Or do I have to do that to both hard drives independently?

This should not be a real big problem, but it is really causing me some mental anguish here.
I will be loading an Office Suite and an Internet connection, software for a Palm and Norton AntiVirus.

I checked on the Compaq site and downloaded the necessary drivers and even the bios upgrade (in case I need that as well). And how do I find out which Phoenix bios ID it has. I do not feel the second hard drive is stanard on this model but it is there none the less. I could not find any documentation on two hard drives and have surfed and read until I am extremely fed up. So can any of you help me? I truely hope so! :winkgrin:

Thanks CyberMom

 

[shawnbowski]

Did you try formatting both hardrives, and installing windows 98?
I know after long time using windows, installing software, deleting
stuff or doing stuff. After a while windows likes to get very unstable, just format both hardrives and do a frash install that might work.........

 

[johnwill]

You should be able to FDISK and format the hard disks independently, Windows of any version automatically recognizes any attached disks, no effort on your part. Chances are that there were a bunch of crosslinked files, and when you ran SCANDISK, the files were truncated/deleted, and that's why you see the problems now. The problems were always there, waiting for you.

 

[cybermom]

MANY THANKS!

Thank you for answering so quickly! I was afraid it was that simple! The back of my old tired brain kept telling me that was what I should do. I appreciate the input and the verifcation. I didn't sleep very much last night as a result of thinking too much. lol oh well! PUNT!

You are a couple of angels! I haven't done anything yet, I did not want to make a bad situation worse. I wanted to 'talk' with someone about it who knows more than I do. :winking:

I like this site and will continue to read the various posts and replies. Never know when one of those answers will be just the ticket that you need.

Again, thank you.

CyberMom