The host adapter recognizes the drive but it gets no drive letter assigned in Win98.

It sounds like you may already have a hard drive booting the Windows 98 operating system. If you are installing additional storage, the drive must first be partitioned with FDISK in order for Windows to assign a drive letter. Occasionally, a drive letter you expect to see gets mixed up by a hard coded CD-ROM or network assigned drive letter assignment. While more often it is the CD that "disappears", if you know the new hard does have a drive letter that is getting lost, the problem may be similar.

Here is a basic walk-thru for FDISK, try the following:

  1. Boot the computer with a Windows 95/98 Startup Diskette.
  2. At the A:\ prompt, type FDISK and press ENTER.
    Note: If the computer asks, "Do you wish to enable large disk support? Y or N", you are using Windows 95 OSR2 or Windows 98. In order to use FAT32, the drive must be greater than 512 Mbytes in capacity and the partition size you select must be greater than 512 Mbytes. FAT16 will be used if you answer no to this question.
    Note: If you have more than one hard disc in your computer, the FDISK Options Menu will contain 5 choices. If there are only 4 options in the menu, skip to step 4.
  3. Select option 5 (Change current fixed disk drive) and choose the new disc drive from the list.
  4. Select option 4 (Display Partition Information). You should see the message "No Partitions Defined".
  5. Press ESC to return to the FDISK Options Menu.
  6. Select option 1 (Create DOS partition or Logical DOS drive).
  7. Select option 1 (Create Primary DOS Partition).
  8. When the computer asks "Do you wish to use the maximum available size for a Primary DOS Partition and make the partition active? Type "Y" for Yes and press ENTER.
  9. Press ESC repeatedly until you exit from FDISK back to the A:\ prompt.
  10. Press CTRL, ALT, and DEL simultaneously to reboot the computer.
  11. Once in Windows, double click on My Computer. The new drive letter icon will be displayed. Right click on the drive icon and select FORMAT from the dialogue box. From the Format Options Menu, select Full Format and Start.

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