WME - fresh install - system locks up when booting...

[SpongeBobPalmBay]

WME
AMD 500
Tyan mobo
Western Digital 8 gig HD
ATI 2 video card

Re-formatted a drive and installed WME. After WME was installed and the system rebooted, it flashed the WME logo for a second and then the drive makes a weird clicking noise, followed by a few more seconds of hard drive activity and then a black screen. Rebooting will give you the option to go into safe mode. Safe mode will boot... normal boot gets the same back screen mentioned above.

W98 SE was previously installed on this machine... when I went to install W98 back onto this machine (before I realized I no longer had the serial) it came up with a message saying something like doublespace or drivespace might have been used on this machine... when I formatted it would have taken care of this - right?

 

[rmrf]

because you said the drive was clicking, it makes me think that you have a bad hdd. I had a WD 80GIG that starting clicking, and even though the diagnostic disk said the disk was fine, when I talked to the WD representative, they said it was a bad disk and would send me a new one. If it ends up not being a bad disk, I'm not sure exactly what the problem is.

If I could ask you; why do you want to install ME? I have found that on a lot of 98 boxes (with the exception of compaq machines) will install 2000 very well.

 

[SpongeBobPalmBay]

Originally posted by: rmrf
because you said the drive was clicking, it makes me think that you have a bad hdd. I had a WD 80GIG that starting clicking, and even though the diagnostic disk said the disk was fine, when I talked to the WD representative, they said it was a bad disk and would send me a new one. If it ends up not being a bad disk, I'm not sure exactly what the problem is.

If I could ask you; why do you want to install ME? I have found that on a lot of 98 boxes (with the exception of compaq machines) will install 2000 very well.

I have a few WME licenses still around... only reason I'm using it.

It's for a friends box. W98SE was working fine in it until a lightning storm came through town and knocked out his modem. I replaced the modem and the system still had a few problems because I belive he went crazy with adding and removing network protocals. I figured it wouldn't hurt cleaning off his HD and reinstalling the OS.

I did a surface scan and a low level scan of the HD (while in safe mode) and it comes up clean... I even formatted it again and reinstalled... hung up at the same palce.

And then this happened...

 

[Jolt2]

I myself would use a Win98se or Me boot disk and start over. Not only format it but fdisk it to set up the partition new. Remove old partition, set new partition, format, run scandisk on hard drive from DOS and install Me. I would not use a hard disk program like Maxtor's Max Blast to do this because I have had trouble in the past with using these types of quick partitioning and formatting programs. The problem I had was other hard drive utility programs would not run and come up with errors. Use the MSDOS software to setup the hard drive.

The lightning may have done more damage to the system or hard drive too. I would do the above first to make sure you have a clean start.