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Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

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I ghosted a Win98 2gig partition to a 6gig HDD and stuck it into a different PC. It seemed to run fine as I loaded drivers and went through several reboots. Then, suddenly, I’m loading the 3c905b drivers for the 3c905b NIC, and I get a blue screensaying that it can’t write to C:, and freezes. On reboot,it comes up and says that there may be a bad sector on C and wants to run scandisk. Scandisk, Norton Disk Doctor, Troubleshooter, and Spinrite find no problems with the HDD. The system actsfine except for this error on bootup that occurs just after Win.exe is executed. Is there some sort of flag that I can delete that will prevent this from happening if there in nothing wrong with the HDD?

I’ve repeated the ghost-load drivers-failprocess twice with the same results – it crashes on loading the 3c905b drivers. Although I removed the drivers, and even the NIC, it still gives me the error.

thanx!

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Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

Clear the entry out of the device manger and make sure your network settings are empty and reboot. The system should detect the card and a regular PCI ethernet card. Just load the default drivers. Go into the device manager at that point and update the driver for the ethernet card. I believe the only thing you need is disk 1 to load the drivers. I don’t think this is a problem with the hard drive, just something conflicting with the loading of the nic, and it’s hard to say what.

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

The error happened one more than the NIC when I tried this – I just started with a fresh install as someone else suggested.

Thanks!

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

When you ghost a machine, you’re ghosting every little detail that was associated with the original machine, including the motherboard resources, devices, etc…

I beleive there’s nothing physically wrong with the hard drive.

Try this… turn on the computer. Upon startup, press F8 to go into the Windows 98 startup menu. Select and start Windows in safe mode. Go to the device manager and get rid of all the system devices, hard disk controllers, network adapters and reboot. The system willredetect and re-install the correct driver components for this machine upon next startup. Install any other drivers that w98 cannot determine. Reboot as necessary.

If this doesn’t work, then someone else might be able to suggest something else…

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

Any tech worth the oxygen he consumes knows this already.

Thanks anyway!

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

I had a similar problem associated with the last sector on several ghosted machines. It turns out that The HD I made the image on was about 20MB bigger than the ones I ghosted the image to. The system still reported that the 20 MB existed even though it did not. Hence, the drive reported error when trying to access the phantom 20MB. i had problems everytime scandisk ran in DOS and other flaky problems with applications in windows.

To fix this problem I used Partition Magic in DOS to shrink the partitions down by 20MB. Everything worked great after that. Make sure you run scandisk in windows first though. Hope this helps.

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

I’m not dealing with 20 MB here, I don’t like Partition Magic, and Scandisk, Norton Utilities, Western Digital’s Data LifeGuard (the offending HDD is from WD), and a few others found no errors on the HDD.

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

All of the above are sound ideas but it seems to me that if you get the same error after removing NIC and driver that you may have some leftovers in the registry. Try using Regclean (a Microsoft download) or do a Regedit search for 3c905b. I remember reading a lot of articles about problems with these cards. A Knowledge Base search gave me 5 hits and the Technet search gave 18.

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

Good suggestion, dukey01, but this doesn’t reek of a registry problem.

Thanks anyway!

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

You did not mention what version of Ghost you are using. I do know there are some issues with older versions of Ghost and large hard drives. You should be able to download the newer version as long as you have your Ghost disk and the serial number. It will update your software. The problem is that Ghost writes the last sectors of the disk differently than Windows can read. This in turn gives you the bad sector message and problems trying to get your PC to work. Version 6.1C fixed this.

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

I’m on 6.1D – good suggestion though.

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

I am sorry but I have to recommend a clean install of Win98. Even if you work out the current problems you may still have some that will pop up latter. You could always edit the registry by hand to remove the old hardware, but it is much more reliable to do a clean install.

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

Hate to admit it, but this is waht I had to do to get rid of the flaky behaviours. Thanks!

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

You have received several very good posts related to your question, however, none answer the question directly. The direct answer is YES! This issue is addressed at length at:
support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q152/4/04.asp

Due to the thousand-character limit on posts to this forum, I am not able to post the entire text but the article describes exactly which flag is used and how to use it. If you simply want to turn off the scan on boot, this excerpted procedure will do the job:

To modify this default behavior, the following new settings have been defined for the [Options] section of the Msdos.sys file:

AUTOSCAN=0
This turns the new feature off completely. The kernel does not check the Clean Shutdown and Hard Disk Error bits, and ScanDisk is not started.

Though this may not be the ultimate solution, it is the direct answer to “…prevent this from happening if there in nothing wrong with the HDD?”

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

Kewl, this is part of what I’m looking for – I can turn off the startup error now! This is the answer I was looking for, but not the answer I needed – see proposed answer 6

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

I agree with toupao.chieng@achemists.com that there is probably nothing wong with the HDD. Ghosting is ideally hardware-specific. It works best when replicating the ghosted image to exactly the same hardware configuration from machine to machine.Before applying the remedy, make sure you have current drivers for your hardware devices, modem, monitor, etc. if different from the choices presented by Windows during hardware detection. Reboot in Safe Mode and remove all hardware listed in Device Manager. Now power-down the machine, then reboot. The cold boot (power-down) is necessary anytime you make significant changes to the hardware configuration so that the system level setup files are executed. As the operating system (Windows) sets up, it will detect each of your hardware devices. Once your hardware is recognized and drivers installed, I suspect all will be right again within your computer.

Raymond Schklar

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

Ummm, thanks for your trouble, but that was already suggested. Thanks anyway!

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

Your problem is that you had ghosted a system configuration from one computer and use that configuration on another system. Its just not gonna work.
It may be necessary for you to go to MSINFO or the so called System Information, run a system diagnostic and delete any flags in the Win.ini section and system.ini section that relates to the other configuration that you had ghosted especially driverwise. About the NIC driver, you must had ghosted a system that had a NIC driver installed and then suddenly using a different one or installing a different one and the system could’nt determine which one to use or to be used.
Your best solution, do a clean install, from scratch.

Jun

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

Unfortunately, I’d run out of points if I gave everyone with correct answers points. Proposed answer #6 got it.

Thanks anyway!

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

Hi there !

It seems you’ve got caught in the “Easiest way of Moving Windows” trap 🙂

Two things you might try :
– First, as someone else suggested, start in “Safe Mode”, remove ALL your drivers (including all the “System devices”) and restart. Hopefully WIndows will identify the new resources and reinstall the drivers correctly.
– Second, you might try to resize your partition to the 2Gb size, reboot, scandisk, resize again to 6Gb, reboot, scandisk and see if error still there.

Anyway you MUST update at least the HDD driver, or Windows assumes you have a “Brand1 2Gb HDD” when you got a “Brand2 6Gb HDD”…

Good Luck

Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

In reply to Win98 – Phantom Bad Sectors

True, true, but a lot of trouble.
Unfortunately, I’d run out of points if I gave everyone with correct answers points. Proposed answer #6 got it.

Thanks anyway!

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