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Hard Drive Failure

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by jaylasun

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I recently updated a computer system running windows 98 with 200mhz processing speed. Something must have went wrong when I installed Win 98 SE, because the system would hang up when it was in the process of shutting down. It would sit there until Iphysical shut the power off. Well, all this caused problems because I did this several times and at every start up Windows didnt' even use ScanDisk. At another time, i was fooling around with the memory chips, I took them out ot look at them and putthem back in. Then the system claimed that It could not find a hard drive. After repeated attempts through trial and error I got it to find the harddrive, but it wanted to format it. I did and tried to reinstall win 98 but the scan disk said that I have hard disk errors that had to be fixed before I could use the drive. How is this possible? I ran scan disk several times and some of the files it wouldn't let me fix them. Can I save this hard drive? Or do I have to buy another one?

14 replies

by thechas

Windows 98 has a number of known shut-down problems.

Start by updating the video drivers.

There is a very good shut-down troubleshooting guide posted at www.aumha.org

If you have RAM problems, and write to the hard drive, you can corrupt the file system, or individual files. This is what I suspect happened to your drive.

Assuming that you do not need to recover any files on the drive, do the following:

Make sure that you have the correct RAM setup.

Boot from a W98 startup disk.
(You can make one on any PC running W98, or download boot disk images from www.madboot.com or www,bootdisk.com)

At the DOS prompt, run fdisk /mbr

Run fdisk, and follow the menus to delete ALL logical drives and partitions.
Exit fdisk

Re-boot.

Run fdisk again, and partition the drive as desired.
Make sure that the primary DOS partition is set as active.
Exit fdisk

Re-boot

Format at least the C: drive
Format c:/s

After the formatting is complete, insert the W98 CD and run setup.

After installing W98, you need to install device drivers.

Chip-set
Video
Sound
Modem

Chas

by jaylasun

I tried what you suggested. I got to the point of reloading the OS and then, then the system hung up. When I rebooted and repeated the procedure, Scan disk told me that something was wrong and it couldnt fix it and that a sector on the drive, was damaged.

by roykelly

There are two other resources for your shutdown problem.

Microsoft's support site is one (http://www.support.microsoft.com)- search for article 239887 and 273824 (the second one address your scandisk not running)

The second resource site iswindows update. Click on tools,Windows Update in Internet Explorer.

by jaylasun

This informattion was helpful, but it didn't correct the problem. But thanks for your effort.

by tootypuck

Sounds like you need to wipe the drive clean then run fdisk, make your partitions and then reformat. Then load in the os again and see if that works.

by jaylasun

I tried that. I got to the point of reloading the OS and then, then the system hung up. When I rebooted and repeated the procedure, Scan disk told me that something was wrong and it couldnt fix it and that a sector on the drive, was damaged.

by don

I think you have a boot sector virus.
I read the other IT's answers and I think they are right but didn't go far enough with the fix.

I would;
Low format the drive (Use Maxtor's wonderful tool maxllf.exe from www.maxtor.com, works on any brand HD too!)

Then run fdisk and setup the drive and you new OS.

DM
Indianapolis

by jaylasun

I changed the bios parameters, deleted any remaining disk management programs; did low level format, fdisk, and a regular format. Windows setup program came up and it went into scan disk. It said that there were some lost clusters and that a file name C:\dir00001 was damaged or unuable. I tried to fix it with scandisk, but it never worked. So I just shut the stupid computer down. Any clue as to what do to now?

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