harddrive boot problems!?!

[daveleau]

In Device Managers, are there any explanation points? Sounds like the Dos Compatibility mode has taken over. I had this happen recently. The Dev MGR showed !'s on both my IDEs and my cd-roms would not work. It took about 9-10 min to boot.
Either that or your BIOS may not support a drive that big. What are your system specs?
Dave

[Gutter Ball]

You can try checking the power cables inside too. My HD made ticking noises and would stall once in awhile so I figured it was going dead. But I was messing with the fans inside my comp today with the power on and as I was adjusting one of them, I accidently pulled the power wire a bit too hard and my HD clicked and stalled! So I just rechecked and tightened all the connections. Just a thought http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[Win_98]

it will do that if your computer is cut off
during use.
you then have 20 sec to comply to booting
in safe mode.
do not boot in safe mode.
hit f8 constantly prior to boot
and do this
scandisk /autofix /all
windows know if you have bad sectors
if it does it will make you do a full scan
which is time consuming but will
fix bad sectors if you let it finish.
if you remove your bus master driver
in safe mode it is gone for good
you have to reinstall win98 on top of it
so it took about 30min.
do that as a last resort if you have too many problem such as corruption, locking up etc and scandisk couldnt fix it.

[johnny 5]

I recently bought a new drive'ibm 34gxp 20.5gig' and installed win98.It ran for about a week with no problems,then one day I turned it on and it got so far through the boot process then it sort of hung with the harddisk light flashing really fast and the drive constantly ticking...eventually booting about 10 mins later with everything running real slow.I have reformated the drive three or four times hoping each time to sort out the problem with no luck:-(I have no idea what the problem is...any advice would be greatly appreciated
THANKS IN ADVANCE.
Johnny
(sorry about the long winded explanation)