Hard disk

[guitarjunkie214]

recently i replaced my hard disk, which had developed bad sectors with a new hard disk and installed windows 98 on the new hard disk. However when i switched on the computer, it did not complete the boot process. can you list and explain all the steps i need to follow in order to diagnose and correct this problem.

 

[jasperjones]

don't install win 98 imo. it's outdated and a security risk. m$ has ended support for win 98 years ago. if you don't want to buy a new OS, consider installing a free one such as linux.

as for your problem, search microsoft's knowledge base for fdisk. it appears the stock fdisk that ships with win 98 media (not win 98 SE media) cannot deal with hard disks >=64GB.

also, I assume you may have installed this hard disk into a computer that's old. it's not clear from your post at what point the error occurs, i'm not even sure that your bios can boot from the hdd (bios updates might help in this regard)

 

[Paperdoc]

Jasperjones has good points. Post answers to:
1. Exactly what is the message that you get when "it did not complete the boot process"?
2. What version of Win 98 did you install? I assume from the post that the installation went normally and you expected the machine to work fine, but it does not.
3. What disk - maker and model and size? I'm assuming it is IDE, with jumpers set to Master.
4. What motherboard? Do you know whether it can handle disks over 137 GB? (This is separate from the note above about the FDISK utility).

 

[sub mesa]

Why don't you just try Ubuntu Linux for a change? Simply download the ISO, burn it and boot from it. You can try it without changing anything or installing anything to your local harddrive. If it can do what you want then it might as well be a better alternative than Win98, which is horribly outdated and insecure.

Also, linux should provide any functionality win98 can offer, including the ability to play older games (using Wine or DOSBOX).