This is a rather baffling problem. I have just received a new 80 GB hard disk from 
Western Digital, and have downloaded the software from their website and set the 
disk up.

The software successfully formated the disk and created the three partitions I wanted, 
each under 32 GB. I was trying to get a disk that, in a pinch, could be read by my 
WinXP machine, and I was told to create FAT32 partitions below 32GB each.

I don't want to format it as one huge partition of 80GB because I don't want 32K 
clusters, and I do want the option to reinstall Windows in the C: drive without any 
impact on my programs and data in the other two partitions.

I installed Win98SE onto the C: drive from a full install CD, and put the disk into 
my Win98SE machine, and then copied backups of all my programs and data from the 
aging Win98SE disk, as a backup in case the old disk should fail.

The PC recognised the new disk as 80GB at startup. And Windows recognised the C: 
partition (22GB) and the D: partition (29GB), but it steadfastly refused to recognise 
the E: partition (29GB).

The thing was, I had done a BIOS upgrade on the machine recently. It has an AWARD 
BIOS. The motherboard is a PAG-2130 made by FIC. I upgraded to a BIOS that they said 
could support a large disk exceeding 67GB, using a file from their website. The new 
BIOS details show up on startup, so it seems to have been successful.





On rebooting to DOS, DOS recognised all three partitions. On checking with the Western 
Digital boot/tools disk which I set up the disk with, by booting again with that, 
it also recognised all 3 partitions. And at boot time the BIOS startup screen saw 
the new disk (Primary Master) as 80GB.

The BIOS, incidentally, is set to "AUTO - LBA" in order to automatically detect the 
disk. I have also tried letting the configuration option in the BIOS detect the settings 
and using those (as USER instead of as AUTO) but with the same result.

In "My Computer" the third partition shows up as "(E:) Local Disk" (so not with its 
actual label of DRV1_VOL3), and when double-clicked it says: "E:\ is not accessible. 
A device attached to the system is not functioning."

Can anyone suggest why the third partition is not being recognised by Windows, even 
though it is recognised by DOS?

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