EZ-BIOS will not interfere with booting to CD. If you have a proper
bootable CD and if the BIOS supports the option, just make the change to
BIOS settings, insert the CD, and reboot. Of course, you wont be able to
read the C: drive. If you have the right sort of utilities then you could
erase and rebuild it from DOS, but it seems that you'll have to reinstall
EZ-BIOS in order to use more than 8Gb, and you're right back where you
started.

If you want to re-install W98 you can simply delete the existing
installation and re-install. Just skip the part about partitioning and
re-formatting. Changing the drives around won't accomplish anything, as
EZ-BIOS will still need to be active in order to see the 13Gb drive, whether
it's master or slave, and you've already demonstrated that you can't boot
from CD and have EZ-BIOS active.

By far the simplest solution is to buy a new floppy drive. Another option
is to limit the 13Gb drive to 8Gb and don't install EZ-BIOS.
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"SS" wrote in message
...
hello, folks =)

i have a somewhat complicated situation which someone perhaps can help me
with

in the near future i will be purchasing a new computer. i currently have
an
older model computer which is serving the purpose fine for me, but soon
will
(hopefully) be a backup computer.

i have two hard drives on my system: a 13GB and a 2GB. The 13GB is the
master C: and the 2GB is the slave D:. my bios is fairly old, so it has an
8GB limitation on it (i contacted the manufacturer of my bios to see if
they
have an upgrade and if it addresses larger disk drives). anyway, i
installed
ez-bios (from western digital) and it allowed full access to both drives
with no problem.

here's my issue: recently, my floppy drive went kaplooey (i tried a new
drive, new connection, etc., with no luck, so i assume it's a bad
controller
on the motherboard). at some point i'd like to repartition my drives and
reinstall windows 98 on it once it is my secondary computer. however ...
the
floppy drive does not work, which is causing issues.

i really don't use the floppy for anything but would need it to boot up
and
run diagnostics and/or start from scratch. so, i'm trying to figure out a
way to be able to get away without using my floppy at all and boot from
the
cd drive (if necessary).

even though my bios is old, it does allow booting from a cd. however,
since
my master hard drive uses ez-bios, booting from the cd drive does not work
(for grins, i tried booting through ez-bios with a cd in the drive to see
if
it might think the cd drive was A:, but it didn't work, lol).

my question(s) is this: is there some way to start from scratch on my
system
without having access to the floppy drive?

what i thought might work in theory is switching the 2GB as the master and
the 13GB as the slave. that way, ez-bios would not be needed to recognize
my
master, and this would allow the cd drive to be bootable, no? in other
words, there would be no need to see the slave drive while booting, so
since
the master drive would not need ez-bios, i could boot directly off the cd.

is any of this possible, and if so, how would i do it?

to sum things up, i want to be able to reformat and set up my computer
without using the floppy drive and having ez-bios set up for the large
drive
(moved to the slave).

thank you!
scott