I had a spare 400 gb sata drive that was pulled from an old XP machine that I wanted to temporarily slave to my win-98 machine (intel 845-based motherboard with 2-port SATA controller add-on PCI board). I disconnected one of the two SATA drives connected to the PCI card and connected the 400 gb drive in its place. Windows 98 booted fine, but (as expected) did not see the 400 gb drive.

I then booted into DOS and ran free fdisk 1.2.1 where I deleted the single NTFS partition on the 400 gb drive and then created a single FAT32 partition (I did not reboot between those 2 actions). I then rebooted, but the system would not boot.

I tried pressing f8 during startup, but that menu never came up. The bios was set to boot floppy first, then drive-0 (which is an IDE connected to Master primary). I disconnected the 400 gb drive and was able to boot normally.

I set the bios to only boot from floppy, and a floppy formatted with win-98 dos (format a: /s /u) with no config.sys or autoexec.bat booted normally. But the floppy won't boot with the 400 gb drive connected to the system. Even if that's the only drive (no other IDE or sata drives) the floppy shows disk activity for about 10 seconds then stops.

I'm going to take the drive and slave it to another (XP) system and mess with it until I'm able to connect it back to the win-98 system, but I was wondering what sort of state the partition table must be in for DOS and win-98 to freeze up during boot when the drive is present. ?

I've connected many IDE and sata hard drives to various win-98 systems in the past and have never encountered a situation where just physically connecting a drive to the system prevented full booting into win-98 - or even DOS.

I have. I created such situations in some of my experiments. Slave it to XP and remove the Partition. Refresh the MBR as well. Then you should be able to access it from DOS.

Use the DOS FDISK to recreate the Partition.

Connecting a SATA Drive can disable Windows 98 if it does not have the proper SATA support. This would not affect DOS though.

I took the drive to a different machine that is dual boot XP/7. The machine was off, but it was in win-7 suspend mode because I hooked up the drive and powered it on and it came up (resumed) and was having some difficulty with the drive. The task bar said it was "installing new hardware", and while that was going on I brought up the drive managment console and I think it was showing 2 instances of the drive, showing the same drive identification number and showing it/them as uninitialized. But it wouldn't let me do anything with it.

I rebooted the machine and started it in XP, but never got past the spash screen (with the 3 blue boxes scrolling left to right). Drive light showed what looked like random or intermittent activity. I let it go for about 15 minutes and hit the reset and started win-7, but again it never got past the spash screen. So there is something about this drive that not even the "power" of an NT-based OS can overcome.

You could try an USB Adapter or Enclosure if you have one.

If you have a duplicator dock, you could rewrite it.

I would hotplug it and use tools I wrote to get RAW access and clear it.

Edited October 5, 201510 yr by rloew

Another option is to use Hirens Boot CD, which has a mini Windows XP live system, among other tools, which you can use to reformat the partition.

All you need is an extra CD or USB flash drive to boot it from.

Hirens is not allowed here as it is still considered warez and illegal

With the drive disconnected, get into Setup and make sure BIOS is not auto-detecting the ATA modes of each drive every boot.

Set your other drive(s) to User/manual settings. Then reconnect the new drive and see if you can get back into setup. Try auto-detecting the drive. If it hangs, reboot and set the parameters manually. I don't think they have to be correct at this time, just valid, so pick small numbers.

Hopefully upon reboot you will be able to get to a DOS prompt. Then you can use other tools such as MHDD to reset the drive.