Hard Drive Unreadable on new System

This past week end I did an upgrade from a 400 Mhz k6-2 to a 1 Ghz PIII using a DFI Mother Board. New items were: DFI Mobo, 300 Watt PS in a new Tower, and 256 Mb of PC 133 Memory and a Nvidia G2 AGP card. The hard drive is a Maxtor 30 Gb 5400 RPM with all software (Win 98). I tried to boot from the hard disk but no go. I booted from a floppy Start up and tried DIR on the Hard Drive: No files. I then formated the Hard Drive and tried to install Windows 98 (Not SE). I got an error code that said there were too many files in the root directory. Scan Disk found and fixed lots of errors. 2nd try at installing Win 98, Scan disk found even more errors. To make a long story short, I finally downloaded Maxtor's Low Level Format, and waited abot 6 hours for it to perform it's task. After that everything went ok in reinstalling all of the software.

The reason I am writing this is to see if anyone has ever ran into this kind of problem before. I asked a tech at a computer shop and he had never heard of it before.

hmmm... were the jumpers set correctly? you were using a fat32 or fat file system right (not ntfs, ext2, etc.) Other than that I dont know what could be wrong other than mebbe you exposed it to some magnetic interference that fubared it badly. (You didnt put the hard drive on top of your stereo speaker when you were upgrading did you??)
only things that come to mind...
-k

I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the Corporate Republic of America...

Yes. It happens more with VIA chipset motherboards. You get false bad sectors. The easiest way to remove them is to repartition the hard drive using fdisk. Then reboot and format.

Cast not thine pearls before the swine