i need a bit of help with a drive problem.we have been trying to install second hard drive into my computer, but when i go to click on the drive, it says that there is a problem 'a device attached to the system is not functioning', but i have checked multiple times and there is no problem with the connections. i have a Quantum Fireball CX 6.8AT and i know that it is a bery old har drive. when i go to the device manager in the control panel, the name of the drive is '~y~y~y~y~y~y~y~y~' and it says it is working fine. what is wrong??

Am I reading this right? You have a hard disk which shows up good in Device Manager but identifies itself as '~y~y~y~y~y~y~y~y~'. That's a very strange name for any disk or did something go wrong when you posted your message? If that's really what it says then go into your BIOS setup and see what you have there. The BIOS may have autodetected it and got it wrong. Since this is a very old disk it might have a remapping utility sitting in the master boot record which is confusing your BIOS. Unless you have an ancient BIOS with a 1024 cylinder limit you should always get rid of these remappers. They aren't needed anymore and they only make it harder for your BIOS to read the disk properly.

If you don't have any useful data on the disk there is no harm in scrubbing it clean. This bit of machine code will do the job. You put the offending disk in as a master, remove any others and boot from a DOS floppy.

DEBUG (ENTER)
;ONCE YOU SEE THE DEBUG DASH PROMPT (-) TYPE IN THE FOLLOWING:

A (ENTER)
;DEBUG WILL NOW OUTPUT A SERIES OF LETTERS AND NUMBERS. NOW ENTER:
MOV AX,330 (ENTER)
MOV CX,1 (ENTER)
MOV DX,80 (ENTER)
MOV BX,3800 (ENTER)
MOV ES,BX (ENTER)
INT 13 (ENTER)
INT 3 (ENTER)
(ENTER)
G (ENTER)
Q (ENTER)

YOU SHOULD NOW BE BACK AT AN A: PROMPT.

YOU WILL NEED TO REBOOT, RUN FDISK AND FORMAT.

According to another post on this forum you can also use FDISK /MBR. Once again, you boot from a DOS floppy and it works on the master disk. I've never tried it but have had it confirmed by a PC boffin. Incidentally, I've found Win9X's FDISK to be unreliable. In the past it has condemned perfectly good disks. I always use DOS 6.22 for partitioning and formatting hard disks.

If the disk is being identified correctly but what we read isn't what you typed then the bit about remapping ulilities still holds good but the solution might be simpler --

Boot from genuine DOS - ie 6.22, not */?\* DOS 7 which is what lurks beneath Win9X - repartition and reformat.

Is it on the primary or secondary channel
Slave or Master

i was correct in sayiing that it shows up as '~y~y~y~y~y~y~', but that shows up in the device manager and it shows up as 'D:' on the windows explorer. when i go to open the D: drive, it says 'a device attached to the system is not functioning'. on the disk i have some stuff for my website i wasnt able to put onto the server i use and a couple of gigabytes of music and stuff, which isn't that important. i tried formatting the drive in dos using 'format d:' but it said it couldn't recognise the drive.

if you need any confirmation, here are some pictures i took and uploaded them to my server.

http://fredulom.bravehost.com/error1.jpg

http://fredulom.bravehost.com/error2.jpg

http://fredulom.bravehost.com/error3.jpg

was there a Dynamic drive overlay (DDO) on the drive.

what is that?

Short for Disk Drive Overlay, DDO is a TSR that loads onto sector two of the hard drive and is used for computers that do not support LBA mode. DDO allows the computer to support and see larger then 520 MB

see

award bios upgrade
in CPU and motherboards
read about maxblast3

If you ran the debug routine this will strip the drive of every thing even if you had a DDO.

If this was my disk, I'd be hooking it up into another PC in the hope that I could rescue the data. Next I'd run that DEBUG routine to clean it up. Finally, I'd put it back into my own PC, make sure the BIOS identified crrectly then boot from a real DOS floppy and FDISK and FORMAT it. If you prefer FAT32 then you can use the Windows drive converter on it later.

Nice thread & coments gentlemen.... that's what this support section was designed for.

It's nice to see something other than "I need a driver for my unknown device and unknown os". :gabby:

i need a bit of help with a drive problem.we have been trying to install second hard drive into my computer, but when i go to click on the drive, it says that there is a problem 'a device attached to the system is not functioning', but i have checked multiple times and there is no problem with the connections. i have a Quantum Fireball CX 6.8AT and i know that it is a bery old har drive. when i go to the device manager in the control panel, the name of the drive is '~y~y~y~y~y~y~y~y~' and it says it is working fine. what is wrong?? check your jumper settings on the secondary drive
it needs to be set for slave.