Win98SE HDD size limit

[catweazle]

I recently tried installing a Maxtor 80gb HDD on my PIII 1ghz system.
Both the Aopen AX3S /Award BIOS seemed to recognise the size of the drive,
but I kept getting "Error writing to drive C:" crashes.
I've had to stop using the drive.

Is there a limit to the size of HDD that Win98SE can support, or is it
a BIOS issue here?

Any help greatly appreciated.

[degsy]

Welcome :)

How did you partition and format the drive?

[catweazle]

Cheers Degsy,

I didn't want partitions. I just let Windows format it. In fact the whole installation went really smoothly, then I began to get disk write error messages whenever I tried to install a program.

Just wanted to know if Win98SE can support an 80gb drive.

[degsy]

yes, it should be ok if it detected it and installed it ok.

If it is a blue screen with a Cannot Write to Disk message then you may want to run diagnostics on the drive.

You can use Powermax for this.
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

Also check the physical connection of the drive.

[catweazle]

Yes it's the dreaded blue screen. I installed and ran Norton Systemworks/Disk Doctor several times but it couldn't successfully complete the surface scan due to a mystery application running in the background (Norton Goback?)
The HDD activity light was constantly flickering as well.