🚀 go-pugleaf

Hopefully, I'm overlooking something very simple here...

I bought a new PC mid-95 (P90, 4x IDE CD-ROM, 1Gb IDE Quantum Fireball, Diamond
Stealth 2Mb DRAM, 16Mb RAM). When I purchased it, I removed the HD from my old
machine and connected it as slave to the new machine, and transferred all of my data
to the new hard drive. I then replaced the slave into my old PC, which I then sold.

I now want to repartition my 1Gb HD, so first I need to get all of the data backed up.
I had another Quantum HD lying around (a 170Mb ProDrive ELS, if that means anything)
so I've compressed all of the critical stuff and want to copy it to this drive.
Part of the non-critical stuff was OS/2 Warp, which I had in a primary partition. I
was alternating between a DOS 6.2 boot and Warp boot using OS/2's boot manager.

I hooked up the 170Mb as slave on the first IDE cable. The second cable has been 
de-activated in the BIOS. I changed the jumper settings on the slave (ie. removed it)
and have managed to get the BIOS to autodetect both slave and master.

I am booting DOS off the first disk (or floppy) and running DOS FDISK to create the 
required partitions on the second disk. FDISK is detecting the disks okay, with no
partitions on the second. I then create a primary partition on the second (as
the full size of the disk) and have to reboot for the change to take effect.

After rebooting, DOS cannot see the second drive at all. When I run FDISK again,
it finds the second disk and says it has no partitions. I can create again, but the
same thing happens.

I tried removing the 1Gb disk and booting the 170Mb disk as master. I got this
working to the point where I installed DOS on it. As soon as I hooked this drive
up as slave again, I could now "see" the partitions on the slave but when I tried
making use of it, it was obvious it was pretty screwed up. Running scandisk on it
caused continual, changing errors. Basically, it was one sick puppy.

My thoughts:

* the fact that I've had OS/2 with boot manager on the first disk is
  causing these probs or
* these two HD's don't like running off the same cable for some weird reason

Anyone have any ideas? If I need to, I'll plug the drive into my flatmates
computer and setup a laplink cable to get the data off my master drive.

Thanks,
David Gilliver
(dgillive@macquarie.com.au)