I recently purchased, and installed, a 100 gig 7200 RPM Western Digital hard drive. I now have 2 hard drives on my PC. I have a 20 gig Western Digital (that came with the system) that I have my operating system and only the basic stuff on...printer, scanner, burner software and the like. I have the 100 gig for data storage and programs. I have 3 partitions on this drive...D (50 gig), E (25 gig), and F (25 gig). Here is my problem:
After having the 100 gig drive on the system for about 3 weeks, I got an error one day that said that there were errors on my D drive and scan disk started up, which then went into a surface scan. It reported many bad sectors on this drive and after about 1 hour, I aborted the surface scan. I did a search and found that there are known issues with Win98 and hard drives larger than 32 gig. I downloaded the patch from Microsoft's site to fix this problem and ran the patch. It corrected the problem with the D drive, but now it says that I have errors on the E drive. I called Western Digital and told them my problem. They said that they know the patch will work if it is run immediately after the new drive install, but they can't say for sure what will happen after using the drive for some time, then installing the patch. Since it had been a few weeks, they said to write zeros to the hard drive for about 500 cylinders, abort it, then reformat and partition. That should fix my problem, since the patch had already been executed. I did this and all was fine. No more scan disk errors. Then when I went to start installing things, I got the blue screen error "Cannot write to drive E. Data may be lost. Press any key to continue." I get this error when installing or putting anything on drive E or F, while drive D has no problems at all. What's really funny is that after I press any key to continue, it wrote to that drive anyway. The program *was* installed. The error message was just an inconvenience because it did it anyway. Or was it just an inconvenience? Will I one day lose this data? I feel uneasy about it. And it's more that an inconvenience. I want to get rid of this problem. Am I missing something here? I welcome any and all comments.
I have since performed diagnostic scans on the drive, and everything comes back fine. PC is only 1.5 years old and BIOS was updated when hard drive was installed.
Here are my system stats:
Pentium III
550 Mhz
512 RAM
Win98 SE
Thank you,
Namoren
After having the 100 gig drive on the system for about 3 weeks, I got an error one day that said that there were errors on my D drive and scan disk started up, which then went into a surface scan. It reported many bad sectors on this drive and after about 1 hour, I aborted the surface scan. I did a search and found that there are known issues with Win98 and hard drives larger than 32 gig. I downloaded the patch from Microsoft's site to fix this problem and ran the patch. It corrected the problem with the D drive, but now it says that I have errors on the E drive. I called Western Digital and told them my problem. They said that they know the patch will work if it is run immediately after the new drive install, but they can't say for sure what will happen after using the drive for some time, then installing the patch. Since it had been a few weeks, they said to write zeros to the hard drive for about 500 cylinders, abort it, then reformat and partition. That should fix my problem, since the patch had already been executed. I did this and all was fine. No more scan disk errors. Then when I went to start installing things, I got the blue screen error "Cannot write to drive E. Data may be lost. Press any key to continue." I get this error when installing or putting anything on drive E or F, while drive D has no problems at all. What's really funny is that after I press any key to continue, it wrote to that drive anyway. The program *was* installed. The error message was just an inconvenience because it did it anyway. Or was it just an inconvenience? Will I one day lose this data? I feel uneasy about it. And it's more that an inconvenience. I want to get rid of this problem. Am I missing something here? I welcome any and all comments.
I have since performed diagnostic scans on the drive, and everything comes back fine. PC is only 1.5 years old and BIOS was updated when hard drive was installed.
Here are my system stats:
Pentium III
550 Mhz
512 RAM
Win98 SE
Thank you,
Namoren
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