LLXX

Backup your data NOW. A failure will occur very soon.

Learn to do it yourself, noone is going to do your homework for you. Integer quantities should not be stored in floats.

Make sure it's not overheating and recieving sufficient ventilation. Overheated electronics do strange things...

PSU might be the cause, if the drives are fine in another computer. The sound not only occurs if the drive is failing, it'll also happen if the power drops below minimum for a short time.

Another reason why I don't use antivirus software anymore (I upload suspicious files to online multiscanners like virusscan.jotti.org or inspect them manually). It's not even a virus by definition, as virii are supposed to infect other files.

DMA mode has to be enabled for the drive. In the Device Manager, open the properties for the hard drive, and under Settings ensure DMA is checked.

If I remember correctly, Ghost has an option to restart automatically after process is finished.

Either that or an older version like Office XP or 2000.

At one point I remember having several IE windows, Photoshop with a rather large image, and several Torrents running in the background. Probably around 20 processes total.

It was a 120Gb WD1200JB. The obvious answer to why NTFS produces more disk activity is that it is a considerably more complicated filesystem than FAT32. More information is kept about each file, and it is also 'journaling' - for each write to a file, an additional one is made to the log.

I'm still using OfficeXP, don't know why everyone just wants the newest word processor...

What's the BSOD message, and is it the same every time?

Original configuration (still using it now):1 256Mb 2 empty 3 empty 4 empty 1 256Mb 2 256Mb 3 empty 4 empty No problems, 512Mb 1 256Mb 2 256Mb 3 512Mb 4 empty Didn't work at first, needed MaxFileCache=524288 and then worked fine. 1 256Mb 2 256Mb 3 512Mb 4 1Gb No problems, 2Gb.

This is what I was refering to.

You seem to be a hardware manufacturer or an affiliate of one What I find most disturbing is the rate at which software efficiency is decreasing, and Vista is a perfect example of such a decline. Software efficiency does seem to be decreasing, but that does NOT mean that POS Windows 98/ME are more efficient than Windows 2000/XP. What it means is that Windows Vista is more innefficient than Windows XP. POS Windows 98/ME are much more inefficient, lower quality, much less capable than Linux, WIndows NT flavors, and OS/2 WARP. That is a fact!!! We're not comparing 9x to 2K/XP, we're comparing 2K/XP to Vista. You're in the wrong thread

It's the "random" seeks that cause the most wear on the actuator arm bearings. If you defrag frequently, there will be much less fragmentation and thus not many clusters will have to be moved around.Most imaging software do linear reads/writes, i.e. starting from the very first sector and continuing on to the last. In this way the motion of the actuator is slow and constant, so there is little wear. As well I'd like to mention that FAT32 seems to cause less seek activity than an NTFS filesystem. as tested with a new installation of WinXP twice, once on FAT32 formatted disk and then again with NTFS.

Yes, you find that surprising?Anyway a Validation screenshot would be much appreciated

I've used 2Gb successfully for a few months (on borrowed RAM, the two sticks didn't even match ). Nothing more than stock 98SE with MaxFileCache limit setting. From what I could see, it does use all of it - I had disabled the swap file and never ran into any "out of memory" errors.

http://cutka.szm.sk/files/ffdshow-20051111.exe This is the one. There's a list of them here: http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/tikiwiki/ti...Getting+ffdshow

That was also going to be my suggestion. The simplest always works

Check the capacitors. If you see any that are bulging or leaking, there's the problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague for more info.

I have "ffdshow version Nov 11 2005 21:30:27 (icl 8, ansi)" - it works fine on 98SE. Have you tried a manual install? Edit: I've successfully run the installer for the version you mentioned (didn't finish it, as I obviously don't want to mess up an already working confiuration). Are you using a patched kernel or similar, which is giving the wrong versionnumber to the installer?

Again, excellent. It looks like the original Win95 ESDI_506.PDR is good up to 137Gb. Win95 also internally uses a 32-bit linear sector address (while 2K/XP+ use 64-bit if I remember correctly).I have stated this in my past posts, but I don't think I made it clear enough. First, the infamous KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/246818/EN-US/ Notice the emphasized wording. It is implied that Windows 98 does *not* support IDE hard disks larger than 32 GB in size unless KB243450 fix is applied, which updates ESDI_506.PDR to 4.10.2186 (FE) or 4.10.2225 (SE). However, once again notice the wording: I have two 120GB drives, one of which has nearly 90GB of data on it. I scandisk them regularly and nothing odd is noticed (the occasional lost clusters following a bad shutdown, wrong freespace count, all quite common and non-threatening errors). I am using ESDI_506.PDR 4.10.2222 - the Original file of 98SE release. So it seems, I do NOT need 4.10.2225 to utilise HDDs of greater than 32 gigabytes and the problem is localised to "computers that use a Phoenix BIOS and use the Phoenix BitShift translation algorithm." Furthermore, Thus it would appear that Micro$oft is lying. "The changes required to support media larger than 32 GB in Windows 95 would require architectural changes that cannot be supported on these platforms" is a totally Null and Void statement. They just didn't want to. The ESDI_506.PDRs are very similar between 98FE and 95b. They just didn't want to add the extra code they added in 4.10.2186 to 4.00.1111/9, instead they decided to kill the whole problem by discontinuing support! In this way, KB246818 should've been better named "Windows 95 Does Not Support Hard Disks Larger Than 32 GB If Using Phoenix BIOS And BitShift Translation", although that was probably a bit too long for their liking The truth: Windows 95 supports hard disks of up to 137 GB in size, except on systems with a Phoenix BIOS using BitShift translation. Perhaps someone should email them again, pointing to this thread. Getting something from here listed under http://www.48bitlba.com/tools.htm should also be a good idea, as Loew's own patch seems to have gotten listed there, and also http://www.48bitlba.com/faq.htm#FAQ7 should be ameliorated appropriately

According to something I read on the Intel site a while ago, their integrated graphics controllers can dynamically adjust the amount of system memory allocated to VRAM.

Clean the cooling system and ensure it's not overheating. Also, a reinstall of DirectX may be needed.