My System: TYAN TOMCAT i815T V1.08 Intel PIII 1Ghz Antec 350w PSU 2 times 256mg PC133 memory TOSHIBA 16X DVD Plextor CD/RW Western Digital 40.GB 7200 ata100 HD Western Digital 20.GB 7200 ata100 HD ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 128 PRO AGP 32MEG SOUND BLASTER LIVE! VALUE Win98se I installed the above new mobo, cpu and psu, because my previous system (4yr old SY-7VCA-E Soyo Socket 370 and PIII 1Ghz and case psu) was having startup problems. After installing new mobo/cpu/psu and starting up the computer, the American Master BIOS recognized all my drives and the cpu as well as the memory. I got no error beeps. I made no changes to the BIOS other than setting the correct time. The date was already correct. I installed the 2 memory modules in Dimm1 and 3, as per instruction. When trying to start up, I got a black screen with the text: can not read drive C. Drive C, as seen by my bios, is my master drive WD20gig, which was working perfectly in my other system and already had my OS installed on it. Not knowing what else to do, I proceeded to do a format and clean install of win98 using the Procedure I have successfully done before from the Microsoft Knowledge Base. After running fdisk and deleting and creating an active primary dos partition, I inserted my Win98CD as per instructions. The windows scandisk gave me the following message: ScanDisk cannot read from the last cluster on drive C. This cluster is either damaged, or your system is not configured properly. Drive C may need to have Logical Block Addressing (LBA) enabled to work properly, or its disk partition may be incorrectly marked as a non-LBA partition. Data loss can occur if your LBA setting or disk partition type for this drive is misconfigured. Check your computer's BIOS setup utility, or contact your computer manufacturer, or have your computer checked by a qualified computer hardware technician. If you are sure your drive is configured correctly, click Continue to have ScanDisk check drive C for errors. I checked the BIOS to make sure LBA was enabled.The BIOS choices are "auto" and "disable". "Auto" says it means enabled, and this is what was already set. So I started the installation process again and chose to have ScanDisk check drive C for errors. I got the following message: If your computer's LBA setting is configured improperly and ScanDisk continues ScanDisk may report and repair errors incorrectly. This could result in severe damage to your data or could incorrectly mark sections of your drive as bad. Are you sure your system is configured properly? I said "yes" and continued since I had no data on the newly formatted WD20 anyway. ScanDisk proceeded to find so many bad sectors that I quit the process. I figured that my harddrive was bad, so I purchased a new Maxtor 80gig ATA133. I switched out my WD for the Maxtor, and my BIOS recognized it. I used the Maxtor software to create 2 partitions. 1-20gig 2-60gig. Per the Maxtor instructions, I proceeded to install win98. I got the same ScanDisk message as above. I decided to start over using fdisk on the Maxtor. I deleted the partitions with fdisk and created 2 new partitions and set the first one as my primary dos active. I formatted again and proceeded to do setup with the Win98se disk as per instructions. I got the exact same messages as above about LBA settings and false positives concerning bad sectors. I continued and started getting bad sector reports. Then I canceled out. Next I tested both drives in another computer. I ran the Windows utility to scan the drive for bad sectors. None were found. I loaded up each HD with jpgs and mp3's and videos. I was able to access and play all of the files I had just moved to the 2 HDs in question. So, the problem is not with the hard drives. Any ideas? jg
