Help, Hard Drive hell......Hard drive not installing. Win98se

Hi all.
Here's a strange one ( for me anyway)
My girlfriends PC needed a bigger hard drive so I installed one. The
PC is P2, 550, Win98se. So I installed H\D, formatted and installed
Win98se. When Win98 completes install, it reboots and tells me there
is an error in the registry and it needs to fix it, please reboot. So
I reboot, the registry is fixed. No, the same error message comes up.
Repeat........

Also I have attempted to install Directx 8 which seems to install but
after reboot its gone back to directx 6 that comes with the Win98
installation. The original 6Gb H\D win98se installation had Directx 8
on it.

Before the H\D change this machine worked fine. The only thing that
has changed is the H\D. The old H\D was 6Gb and the new one is
24Gb(UDMA2). I have automatically detected the new H\D in the Bios.
Before formatting I deleted all DOS partitions and created new ones.
I've even Fdisked the MBR as the old OS on the bigger H\D was XP Pro.

Incidentally (or not) I tried to use the "low level format" utility on
"PC Cillian" which I normally use if I really want to clean a H\D. It
wouldn't run. It stops when it tries to load the ATAPI Driver.

I know the bigger H\D. Its just came out of my own machine so I know
it works. I use this copy of Win98 on all machines so I know it's ok

I'm sure all these clues point to a solution but I can't see it.
Any ideas or help appreciated.
Thanks.

 

It could be bad memory. Check the following:

Registry Checker Continues to Detect Registry Damage:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=186909

Download DocMemory from http://www.simmtester.com and run it to
test your RAM. (As best as software can, anyway.)

 

Check the manufacturer's documentation for the computer motherboard.

Older system such as this often had an 8 gb limit on the size of the
hard drive and will not access the drive properly (or sometimes not at
all) if it is larger than 8 gb.

Also check with the motherboard manufacturer for a flash BIOS update
for your exact model of motherboard (careful - applying a BIOS update
for the wrong motherboard model can leave you with an unusable
computer).

If that does not resolve the issue then go to the new hard driver
manufacturer's web site and get their BIOS overlay utility which
allows newer high capacity hard drives to be used with older
motherboards (EZ-Drive, Disk Manager, MaxBlast are some of the more
common names for these types of utilities).

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

 

Was the new hard drive formatted in fat 32 or NTFS? You said that it had XP
PRO on it. If it was formateed in NTFS, Win98 will not "see" it. Convert
it back to fat32 and everything should work.

 

It was formatted with FAT 32.
Thanks for the help.
So far things tend to be leaning toward a Mobo that can't see a H\D
above 8 gig. I've tried using overlays before but they tend to slow
the machine down to much.
Although I have detected the H\D and it is listed in boot up it is not
present, well none of the details i.e cylinders,heads etc in the bios.
The size and name are there but no details.
The jumpers are set correctly (master) and it a single H\D with no
partitions.
One of the error messages stated there was a long filename problem and
to run windows scandisk to solve it.. Didn't work.
Thanks all for the help.