Strange Fat32

Your using what we call a drive overlay? If so, just fdisk /mbr , that should stop the bar from coming up. Make sure u have a recovery disk just in case.

umm better yet this may work better , BUT BE CAREFUL.

Be careful with this one! This tiny com file fills the first 512k of your harddrive with zeros thus deleting bootvirus', bootmangers, partitions, etc. You must boot from a floppy or into DOS. When you execute the file nothing appears to happen-until you reboot

http://www2.netquest.com/tech/killboot.com

Try to reconver your partiotion to FAT32.
Use PartiotionMagic for it.
You don't have one? Ask me for. igp@ukrpost.net

If THE OPERATING SYSTEM IS Win 98 then try the formatting by going to ACCESSORIES,THEN SYSTEM TOOLS AND USING THE FAT32 CONVERTER OR HAS THIS PROCESS BEEN TRIED.

if you have already done of answers above, you probably have no more disk, your data is still there, but if you kill an overlay, you might not be able to boot again safely from your disk, i think it's really better for you to have someone to save all your hardisk with a tape and do Backup of your entire hard disk, reformat it, and copy everything again, in my experience i advise you to backup, reformat and then do a fresh install, or you could have prolemns in the future, well that's just my opinion, i do a lot of things like that in the past.

The other guys here have some good answers but let me tell you I have run into some problems before with doing just these. This is a little bit overkill but I have an IBM 10.1g drive and have done quite a bit of formating and reinstalling. If you want to eliminate any possible problems in the future, goto http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm and download the DFT-V152.exe file.

!!BACKUP ANYTHING YOU WANT TO KEEP!!
run this program. it will make you a bootable floppy disk which contains software to check your drive for errors and it also has a LOW LEVEL FORMATING tool which will write over all of the data on the drive with 0's. This will erase all data and partitions.
When this is done bootup with a Windows startup disk and run fdisk. Setup your new partition-s, and reinstall your operating system. Then run fat32 converter in windows.
Once this is done you should be able to install everything back onto your drive and be problem free.

Ive run into long term problems by not doing t

I've never used the IBM drive overlay program, but I have used seagate and westerndigital versions. With them, all you have to do is boot from the drive overlay bootdisk, prob the one you used to setup the drive, then look through the options (maybe under advanced) and there should be an option to disable the drive overlay software and after it is disabled, there should also be an option to remove it.

Goto www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm. Download the DFT-V152.exe file located there.

Please be sure to do a complete backup of all that you want to keep. Then run this program. Follw the prompts to make a bootable floppy and can do HD checks. A LOW LEVEL FORMATING tool which will write over all of the data on the drive. This will erase all data and partitions.
When this is done bootup with a Windows startup disk and run fdisk. Setup your new partitions, and reinstall your operating system. Run the fat32 converter in windows.
Once this is done re-install everything.

Sounds like the "patch" applied to "recognize" the large drive was EasyDrive or similar. The utility that installed the patch (floppy disk ?) should be able to replace the MBR (which now contains the BIOS patch) with the saved, original MBR which it still transfers control to after loading the BIOS extension. If you don't still have the disk you formatted it with look on Manufacturer's website. You may need Partition Magic afterwards to clean up partition sizes.