Very odd problem Windows/Hard Drive problem

[Sacotool]

I have a 2 year old Maxtor 10gig hard drive running Windows 98 installed almost 2 years ago on an ABit BX6r2 mobo w/PII 400cpu. Lately I've had a recurring problem. If I leave the computer for a while and come back there is a blue screen that says "Error writing Drive C" then it usually locks up. When I reboot it says "MASTER BOOT RECORD FAILURE" or something close to that. Then if I shut it off and reboot again all is fine. It's done this 3 or 4 times in the last week. I did a thorough scandisk and it found no bad sectors. I ran a virus scanner and there is no known viruses either. This one has me stumped......

 

[steverama]

I had the same problem last week on an older system that's overclocked. The system is an Intel 166MMX overclocked to 200Mhz using the 83Mhz front side bus. The hard drive crapped out on me so I replaced it with a 1.6GB Maxtor HD. This HD will not wotk with an 83Mhz fsb, and gives me the same error : Error writing to Drive C. So I clocked the fsb back to 75 Mhz, and now the system is at 188Mhz. Kinda sucks since it was always at 200 MHZ since the first day I had received it.

 

[Sacotool]

hmm, very strange indeed. I haven't had my PII-400 overclocked for a several months, plus this problem occurs when the computer is idle.

 

[TonyT]

You might have to rewrite the master boot record of the drive. To do this, go into DOS and type: FDISK /mbr

This should clear out your possibly corrupted master boot record without touching the data on the disk.

 

[Horsepower]

Do you have hard drive sleep disabled in power management?