I've got this 80Gb HD hooked up as secondary master, and it gets recognized by BIOS. When I want to access it through Win98SE, it tells me it's unformatted, though, and asks me to format it. When I want to start formatting (Complete, as it won't accept Quick and'll perform Complete then anyways), it tells me there's not enough memory free to do so and that I should quit a few programs. It even says this when I'm running nothing but Windows itself. I tried going to Dos to format it, but it doesn't recognize drive D, it seems, so I can't format it on there too. Anybody here knows what I can do to start using that HD?

Try F-disk from dos.

Or if it is a WD disk there is a utility called data safeguard, which does the same thing from windows.

It's solved now. As it recognized the HD through Windows, but not through pure Dos, but the formatting utility from Windows was acting up, I tried going into a Dos shell under Windows. 't Is formatting now :ok:

Edit: Result from formatting:
The formatting is complete.
Cannot write BOOT
The formatting has ended.

Guess I'm not at the end of it yet :not_ok:

Never tried it, but i saw a feature in the BIOS setup called low level formatting.

maybe its too big for windows98 to deal with?

In SE? Honestly, I doubt that.

what is your partition size ?
fat32 can only support up to 30 gb or so...
so you need to make 3 patitions at least.


The funny thing is that format doesn't warn you about it. and only concludes that it failed.....

The HD I've been using so far's been 80Gb as well and worked fine without formatting it, so wouldn't know 'bout the partitions.

I believe that SE partitions can go up to 120GB (saw that somewhere), but limitation does not have to be on Windows, but in BIOS.

I got an old Gigabit motherboard which supports only hard disks smaller then 40GB. After updeting the bios, it supports hard disks up to 60GB, which did not help me with new 120GB HD I planed to add to that computer. :blink:

Kon-Tiki,
if that's your main hard disk on that computer, start win98 installation from the CD, and at the blue screen, where you have to select computer settings, hit F3 two times to exit installation. Try to format MRB, type fdisk /mbr. Then use fdisk to create partitions. Restart computer after that, do the same with installation and exit with F3 key, then format all partitions you have made. (make sure you format C with /s parametar.

I usually copy Win98 folder (using just a copy command, not xcopy - you need only files from Win98 folders from the CD, subfolders are not needed) to one of non-system paritions, and then run setup.exe from that directory.

The HD was just broken. Took it to the shop after testing it under Win98SE, Dos, WinXP, Knoppix, the bootable cd of Win98SE and some tools. Now I got one that formatted fine. I installed Win98SE on it, and what do I get? GODDAMN BLOODY FRIGGIN' THE SAME! It's to hit your head against the wall of :wall: How the *dirty word* hell am I supposed to get my comp up and running again?