Desktop

This is definitely odd behavior that the HD would be read as a network drive and that your cdrom doesn't show; what's more strange is that everything appears fine when you use the 3 gig drive.

I'd suggest these steps:

1) First before you drive yourself further up a wall -- try the 40 gig with a totally different computer as you suggested you were thinking of doing. If it acts in a similar fashion then you know its the drive and not anything else. In this case your solution is easy return the drive, get a new one.

2) If the same problems happen on the different computer, I'd check out the bios on the motherboard of the original computer (the one with the Jetway board -- btw I never heard of them..lol). I'm thinking its possible you could just have a way outdated bios that has an issue dealing with the particular model/make of drive you have. While I never had this experience with a HDD there were times a video card I had didn't work until I updated the motherboard bios.

3) Are you sure yourself or someone else didn't change the bios settings from the original factory set default settings? It depends how robust your bios options are but in most (if not all) modern bios menus these days you have the ability to select the block addressing scheme and even the PIO level sometimes. But using factory settings you ensure the most generic settings are being used (the most generic settings support the widest array of commonly used hardware).

All you need to do is install the drivers for the motherboard in my opinion, hence the yellow dots. This might be easier said than done if they are on a cd and you cant see the cd in windows though! Either boot from floppy and copy em onto the hdd from the comand prompt. Or download em of course.

I dont know if this has the right ones for you board as you dont mention the model..... http://www.j-mark.com/dl/dl.html

Look under motherboard driver in the ide column and chipset driver ide - both are down towards the end.

Thanks for the fast comments. I did not mention that this is the second hard drive in this computer that this has happened to, the last one I put in was a 20gig, returned with same explorer.exe error messages, this was a used HD, so replaced with the 40gig new one. Why the same message and why did it work okay for the last 2 months??? Yes I wondered what could the user be doing to cause this, I always put a Bios password on systems, and users are not that good with computers that they could get passed the password. They download a lot of music, can a virus mess up your Bios?? I am sure it has something to do with the Bios and size of drive but it is recognised in there, I am going to try it on another computer now. Thank you

I have had this happen before in a compaq computer. What I endded up finding was that the person tried to reload windows themselves and corrupted the OS. The hard drive also had a virus in the boot sector of the drive that Norton couldn't find.

While you've got HDD hooked up to another PC, scan it for virii.

May want to investigate BIOS updates for mobo and see what problems they fix. Wouldn't hurt to go ahead and flash BIOS anyway.

Mobo is definitely new enough that it should easily recognize and handle a 40GB HDD.

Are you installing Win 98SE? 98SE is much preferable to 98. But either one is subject to file corruption. What apps is user running? Music downloads or porno site access?

Any way to install 2000 pro? Much more stable OS and will run well on 850 Cellie with 128MB RAM.

I'm just thinking as I go here. You really have a strange one. Real head scratcher is why 3GB drive works OK and 40GB doesn't.

Dalton