DaveLH

Hi! I found this thread (and this forum) while searching for a solution to the problem I'm having, and hoping you can help: I recently replaced my system's hard drive after the old one crashed. The new drive is a Seagate PATA 320 GB, and my system was self-built in March, 2002, CPU: AMD Duron, Award BIOS 6.0, Chipset: VIA KT133A. I installed the drive and tried to configure it as my system was before: Dual-booting Windows 98 SE and Windows XP Pro. The 98 partition is 10 GB and the rest of the drive is divided into 50 GB NTFS volumes. Everything is fine under XP, but the system has been randomly freezing in Windows 98, usually during writes to the drive, e.g. while copying to the 98 partition from CD or installing drivers. And now, after installing the sound drivers, Win98 won't finish booting at all -- As soon as the Desktop appears, one of those "snare drum" dialogs appears with the message "Please wait while updating system settings..." but the system always hangs before this completes -- Total screen freeze and the hard drive light remains steadily on -- Only pressing the Reset button recovers from this. I have scanned the disk and it's error-free, and as I say, there are no issues with the drive under XP -- I can even read/write to the 98 partition under XP without problems. Based on the info I've garnered from various sources, I thought everything would be okay as long as the 98 partition was well under the 137 GB limit, even if the BIOS didn't support 48-bit LBA. (As I say, the BIOS is dated from early 2002, which was kind of in the transitional period.) But these system hangs suggest that the BIOS is not liking the large HDD under Win98, and I'm assuming there's no issues under XP because NT-based OSes use HAL rather than the BIOS. But then, why was I able to install Win98 at all? Anyway, I suppose I could continue to just use XP and regard the 10 GB 98 partition as useless (except for holding the XP bootstrap) until I can afford to build myself an up-to-date system. But there are a couple of legacy apps I use that only run on 98 that I'd like to have access to, so any help/advice anyone here can offer I would greatly appreciate. Thanks, Dave