Mystery problem with new hard drive

[Thomas Wendell]

Check in BIOS if there is a setting for Virus protection. That restricts
ANY writings to Cyl 0, sect 0, so there won't be any boot record..
..




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[Rod Speed]

I updated the BIOS, and amazingly enough, everything now
seems to work. Fdisk didn't give me an error message, and
Windows 98 is now installed. I just wish I had tried it before.

Thanks everyone for all the help!!

Thanks for the washup, that may well help someone
using groups.google to research the same problem.

 

[Alexander Grigoriev]

I don't think Windows 98 support disks that big.

 

[Rod Speed]

I don't think Windows 98 support disks that big.

It supports them fine.

 

[CJT]

I don't think Windows 98 support disks that big.

Apparently it does, because the OP got it working with a BIOS update.
I know SE does, but I can't personally vouch for the First Edition.

 

[Nicholas D Richards]

I don't think Windows 98 support disks that big.

Apparently it does, because the OP got it working with a BIOS update.
I know SE does, but I can't personally vouch for the First Edition.
[/QUOTE]

My suspicion is that, by updating BIOS, the BIOS values were set to the
default values. This set Virus Protection to Disabled. BIOS Virus
Protection provides very little security and a lot of problems. In the
days of boot sector viruses being spread by floppy it had a limited
value.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I don't think

Well, there's your problem. You shouldn't do that.

 

[CJT]

My suspicion is that, by updating BIOS, the BIOS values were set to the
default values. This set Virus Protection to Disabled.

By golly, I bet you're right.

BIOS Virus

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

That's theoretically true, but in my experience there's enough design
tolerance in most boards that the capacitors have to be _really_ bad
for them to cause a repeatable problem, and by that time they're
normally at least bulging (or worse -- I've seen a couple that had
exploded). Less severe deterioration will normally only cause intermit-
tent problems (which are even more frustrating than what you have).

I've now tried 3 different cables

no worse than others of its era, in my experience -- many manufacturers
bought their capacitors from the affected supplier (and not just
computers -- TVs, etc., too)


yes, it could

But it doesn't as you should have known if you had bothered to read the thread.

during that era, a common reason for BIOS upgrades was to fix the
handling of newly available bigger disks.

He checked with the drive set at 32GB. It's not size.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Check in BIOS if there is a setting for Virus protection. That restricts
ANY writings to Cyl 0, sect 0, so there won't be any boot record..

Bingo. Strange though that there was no warning from the bios itself