"Missing Operating System"-error when booting with two installed hard drives

[Christian Eriksson]

Hi there!

I have two hard drives residing in my computer's cabinet. Yet, I haven't managed to get them to coexist (both to be connected to the IDE cables at the same time). Both hard-drives are bootable when connected solely as Primary Master and both run windows 95. What I want is to boot my system with both hard drives connected but when I try I get the error message "Missing Operating System"! In my tries to boot the system the one that is connected as Primary Master is 1.3Gb and the other is connected as Secondary Master (4.2Gb) and have 3 partitions (2.1Gb, 2.1Gb and 16Mb). Both hard drives is formated with FAT 16. Can somebody help me here?

As guidance to solving my problem I can tell that running FDISK shows some odd information. Another thing is, when booting from a system floppy-disk the CD-rom driver gets assigned to unit F which i figured out must be the third logical unit on the second hard drive. Then when running FDISK, FDISK won't recognize the file-system on the second hard drive. It reports the file system to be "unknown". FDISK also labels the unit F: as *remote*. What is meant by that?

After running FDISK from the floppy I have rebooted my computer (with boot-sequence c,a) and then got the error message mentioned above. At my first try I got the error message "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". Both hard drives has Jumper Settings according to Master Drive setting. What am I doing wrong here?

Christian Eriksson.

[Avatar]

These may sound a little silly, but it's may be worth the try.

1.) Reverse the boot sequence to A,C
2.) Put both drives on the Primary IDE, one as master, the other as slave.

[Christian Eriksson]

Thanks for your help Avatar!

I've now placed both drives on the primary IDE. Now it works fine and FDISK is showing expected information.

First I checked the jumper settings and found that the smaller HDD (1.3Gb) had not the right settings for Master. Now it's configured according to manual. The other HDD is now slave on the primary IDE. My CD-rom is connected to the secondary IDE (Master) which i also think is the right thing to do. So your tip helped me there!

Another thing is that I'm now facing the problem of having to HDD's that each has been running as a separate system. To my knowledge I can only boot from one constant HDD with a particular system configuration. That makes it hard to run programs installed on the HDD that now is the slave because the windows 95 registry in not read in at boot. Of course I can reformat my slave HDD and reinstall all the programs but it takes some effort and I've also lost some of the installation-files for some applications. OK I know, this latest paragraph is really to be published in a windows 95 newsgroup instead so I stop there.