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Windows Forum / Windows 98 / General Topics / August 2007Desktop Switched between two hard drives
A friend has an old eMachines 480i in his office, with two phyiscal hard drives; a C: drive (named "Server") and a D: drive named "Presario." The "D" drive came from a former computer and contains his office management software. Until Friday, when the computer would boot, it would finish up on the "D" drive's desktop. But Friday, we saw that it booted to the "C" drive's desktop. He swears he didn't change anything and using the DOS window, I can still see the "D" drive and all of its files. We have an upgrade coming up on Tuesday of the office management software. As background, the only reason we stayed on Windows 98, was that we had been told, until this past week, that the management software would not work through the DOS shell of XP (that has changed) AND because until recently, we could not add an XP computer to our old network, successfully. Any ideas as to how to return to where we were for the past 6 six years?  SignatureThank you for advice & ideas! From your description, you have what's called a dual- or multi-boot system -- it can boot to one or another partition. Most such systems have a boot manager that let's you choose which system to boot to, but yours sounds like it has none. If that's the case, it's the BIOS boot order that determines which system to boot. The first hard drive in the boot order is the one that boots. If that's the case, you need to go into BIOS and rearrange the boot order. Then again, I've not seen a BIOS that included two hard drives in the boot order, just the Primary Maser drive, which leads me to... When the D: drive was installed, you may have needed to change Master/Slave jumpers and didn't. The BIOS is confused about which drive is the first on the list. I've never heard of such a thing, but it's something I'd look at. And get a boot manager if you want to regularly switch between systems. I recommend BootIt NG. www.bootitng.com SignatureGary S. Terhune MS-MVP Shell/User www.grystmill.com >A friend has an old eMachines 480i in his office, with two phyiscal hard > drives; a C: drive (named "Server") and a D: drive named "Presario." The [quoted text clipped - 15 lines] > could not add an XP computer to our old network, successfully. > Any ideas as to how to return to where we were for the past 6 six years? Gary, Thanks for the expeditious reply! Here's what I forgot to add to the tale of woe: The first thing I thought of was that somehow the BIOS got messed up. When the machine booted (and still, boots) up, after the Windows 98 splash screen, it drops to a DOS screen with lots of "REM-" lines. Years ago, when our first machine crashed and I moved the drive over, I did set the new "D" drive as a slave to the "C" drive in that computer. So yesterday, I finally found out how to access this ancient machine's BIOS (hit the "DEL" key at the eMachine splash screen) and re-directed the boot order to the "D" drive, then re-booted the machine. The result? A "disk boot failure." So I accessed DOS and compared the "win*.exe" files in both the C & D drives. Although in a different order, they both contained the same six files. I also tried, using the DOS access, to start Windows from the D:\Windows directory, but I received a message that I already had Windows running. So with that, I decided to post here for advice. Thanks again and I hope this post bring more hints to light. SignatureThank you for advice & ideas! SteveG > From your description, you have what's called a dual- or multi-boot > system -- it can boot to one or another partition. Most such systems have a [quoted text clipped - 31 lines] > > could not add an XP computer to our old network, successfully. > > Any ideas as to how to return to where we were for the past 6 six years? > Here's what I forgot to add . . . > [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > order to the "D" drive, then re-booted the machine. The result? A "disk boot > failure." This is normal whenever a hard drive lacks "system code" -- cured by 1. DOS boot from floppy 2. command A:SYS D: which ought to write system code to the hard drive you use as D. This may create other problems: because bootable drives must be set by FDISK as "Primary DOS" partitions and Windows or DOS machines expect to find only one of these. The booting drive becomes C: and any other Primary DOS partition found becomes D. So when you boot from the master drive its partition becomes C: and when you boot from the slave or IDE2 drive it becomes C: and the master drive becomes D (and vice versa.) There seems no advantage in multi-boot options if both options are the same operating system (unlike say Windows/DOS and Linux.) Multiple differing desktop are configured by Windows via / Control Panel / Users as custom configurations for different users (selected by login name and password.) You may find it simpler to boot always from your master drive as C, and configure multiple users if needed. You do not need multiple sets of a solid OS that does everything you want (although a backup clone of C:/Windows may be useful -- see documentation at www.xxcopy.com.) (You also probably do not need AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, integral to Win95 but not used by Win98. Try renaming these so they do not run and see whether you reboot correctly and a bit faster.) SignatureDon Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada) Don, Thanks for the reply. We've never had a need for dual-boot. We've always booted from the C: drive, and allowed the D: drive to hold our management software and data. All machines in the office are running Windows 98SE. They all saw the server as the "S:\" drive and could all access the server and software with only an occasional "burp" that I easily fixed. Last Saturday, 8/18, the server froze up as I was using our management software on the D: drive; even Task Manager wouldn't appear. So, I manually powered down. When I re-booted, it booted normally to its regular desktop, but when I attempted to access my software again, I received a "conmode.dll" error message. I went to the web site of the compiler and downloaded their update for the conmode.dll file; re-booted. Again, we arrived at the proper desktop, but this time, when attempting to run the program, I received a "DFRUN caused a stack problem in Conmode.dll at........." error message. That occured all week, but we always maintained the correct desktop. It was this past Friday, when working with our vendor to start a massive upgrade to our software, that we noticed a different desktop, with games and icons from my friend's kids about five years ago. That's where the mystery lies. We don't want to boot from the D: drive, we just want to get back to where we used to be on Thursday and every day before that. I can access all the files on the D: drive, both through Windows Explorer and DOS. The management software will be repaired tomorrow with Part 1 of the upgrade, but where did an old desktop appear from? SignatureThank you for advice & ideas! SteveG > > Here's what I forgot to add . . . > > [quoted text clipped - 46 lines] > Try renaming these so they do not run and see whether > you reboot correctly and a bit faster.) The desktop doesn't exist as a separate file. It's a collection of entries stored in the registry. A possible way you could get a different desktop loaded is if you are actually booting to a different version of the operating system, and your description, together with you subject line, suggests that maybe you are booting a version of Windows that is actually loading from the D drive instead of the C drive. This can happen if the D drive is a primary partition on a second hard disk, and if it has been configured in the past as a bootable drive (for instance, it was previously installed as boot drive in another machine) and if the boot process cannot detect valid boot information on the original boot drive. You can test this by going into BIOS setup and configuring the boot process so that it will not attempt to boot from the second hard disk if the boot to the first hard disk fails. Then try booting and see if the boot fails. If the above theory might be correct then your primary hard disk drive might be failing. You should immediately copy everything of value from the C drive to backup. Then give the C drive a thorough diagnostic test. SignatureJeff Richards MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User) > Don, > Thanks for the reply. We've never had a need for dual-boot. We've always [quoted text clipped - 29 lines] > but > where did an old desktop appear from? >The desktop doesn't exist as a separate file. It's a collection of entries >stored in the registry. The following registry key appears to hold the locations of various special folders including the desktop folder: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders My desktop is here: C:\WIN98SE\Desktop - Franc Zabkar SignaturePlease remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email. |
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