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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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

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

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