100/120gb ide

[cdoublejj]

yes i set it as active. i know gparted can also make it an mbr part instead of gpt if you tell it to but, it refuses to cooperate with my onboard gfx. the HDD is WD black i don't know what model i'd have to take it out of it's cage to find out.

Edited January 13, 2012 by cdoublejj

[allen2]

If you did a gpt a partition, that could also be the problem. W98 shouldn't boot from a gpt partition unless heavily modified.

As you seem to have another working computer, could you try to delete all partitions (of this drive) and the delete the mbr (of this drive) using for example mbrwizard or testdisk ?

Edited January 13, 2012 by allen2

[cdoublejj]

possibly i just use part logic it practically does the same thing, atm i wanna try a an experiment and see how 98se setup handles formatting the drive.

[cdoublejj]

Figured it out.

By formatting the and partitioning the drive my self I indecently missed crucial steps in setup.

You see setup when formatting the drive makes it active and installs the proper boot files, HOW EVER when i format manually with my live boot CDs it sees that nice and neat partition and goes "oh i must have already setup the hard drive time for step 2"

Thing is the partition programs only partition they don't install the 98SE boot files. So i i erased all the partitions and wrote the changes. I let 98se format the drive to my surprise it didn't come out with some weird size with half the drive showing up. It properly formatted with FAT32 LBA and fully installed TWICE (borked a driver install).

when i run my driver installers from Toshiba it ask for extra files upon reboot on some drivers and it sucks cause i have to track down all the files and burn them off to a disk.

Edited January 15, 2012 by cdoublejj

[RJARRRPCGP]

Failure at the same clusters sounds like a real old school problem, was usually seen with 386s and 486s!

Back in the 1990s, it means the BIOS has the HDD capacity-related parameters set wrong.

(Back in the days where the number of cylinders, heads and sectors per track had to be manually entered.)

But with your PC, it should be fine at 100 and 120 GB. That's within the early 2000s LBA 28-bit limit.

Edited January 15, 2012 by RJARRRPCGP

[buyerninety]

RJARRRPCGP , indeed BIOS translation or CDOUBLEJJ mentioned he is installing additional files from Toshiba, possibly software

for the laptop that affects the translation... or that software/BIOS is emplacing a HPA [Wiki] onto the HD (also can cause I/O errors) ref;

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk-11.html

section 11.5,

Maybe there is a section in the BIOS (particularly relevant to Phoneix BIOSes) which allows him to toggle on/off whether a HPA is

activated?.

->CDOUBLEJJ seems happy that the current prob is fixed, so we are really only 'kicking the can' now as to what could

have caused the original problem that gave I/O Errors...from elsewhere on the web I believe his orig HD's actually

had EXT3 and other partitioned filesystems & OSes on them...

If that wasn't it though, for completeness (others having I/O errors) I'll mention a possible 3rd Cause...he mentioned

about using a cage for the HD... if that's an electronic HD enclosure there's a possible problem, - from the HPA wiki;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

"Some vendor-specific external drive enclosures (Maxtor) are known to use HPA to limit the capacity of unknown replacement hard drives installed into the enclosure. When this occurs, the drive may appear to be limited in size

(e.g. 128 GB), which can look like a BIOS or dynamic drive overlay (DDO) problem. "

So if you were using a HD enclosure (not a simple metal and wires box, but rather with an electronic enclosure) it

could impose its own translation geometry upon any HD installed in it, possibly giving an incorrect translation for

current high capacity HD's. Cheers

Edited January 16, 2012 by buyerninety