Hello W98 File/Disk Management Newsgroup,,,,

And, THANKS for your advise, time, and help!!!!


Using the following environment:

o Motherboard is: SPACEWALKER SHUTTLE HOT-637
o Windows 98 Second Edition is installed (no upgrades, i.e no Service
Paks at
this time)
o Award Modular BIOS V4.51PG Award Plug & Play BIOS
Extension v1.0A
Copyright 1997
o A Fujitsu Hard Disk (MPB3064ATU) rated at 6.48GB on drive D:
(Secondary/Master) ~ D:\ Drive

Bios set for the D: drive to the following:

USER 13,410 Cylinders 15 Heads 63 Sectors MODE: NORMAL


o The Fujitsu supplied ERASE and DIAGNOSTIC were executed as required in
a pure DOS environment and both ran to completion without error.
The D: disk is now clean with binary 0's written to the disk!

o Fdisk from DOS ran to completion in the creation of one primary
partition with
no errors and all 6.48GB was recognized.
o Format from DOS ran to completion with no errors for all 6GB.
o After a boot the BIOS shows 6.48GB and W98SE recognizes the D: drive
as 6.03GB and FAT32,,,,so far so good!!!

When the pure DOS execution of "SCANDISK D: /checkonly /surface" the MAP of
the drive did not show any red colored B's ("some bad sectors"), and all
seems to be good.

However, when the SCANDISK reached the 512,378 CLUSTER (about the 2.09GB
point) SCANDISK hung!! It seemed to be stuck on this CLUSTER with no further
changes in the display to show any progress of SCANDISK after several hours
of run time.

The SCANDISK was executed using the following four methods:

1. from Pure DOS (SCANDISK.EXE),
2. a W98SE Recovery boot diskette (SCNADISK.EXE),
3. W98SE SAFE mode using SCANDSKW.EXE, and
4. W98SE normal boot (SCANDSKW.EXE).

All of these SCANDISK started producing errors at the 2.09GB point and the
SCANDISK producing a LOG file showed the errors for all CLUSTERS remaining on
the disk(???) !!!!.

The SCANDISK found on the C:\ drive are the following:

COMMAND\SCANDISK.EXE 141KB 4/23/99
WINDOWS\SCANDSKW.EXE 5KB 4/23/99 Version 4.70.1998

The SCANDISK used from the W98SE Recovery Diskette is the following:

Eramdrive)\ SCANDISK.EXE 143,818 5/6/98

After searching on the www.support.microsoft.com for any similar description
the following items were found:

o The IDE upgrade (Article ID = 273017).
o The upgrade for esdi_506.pdr (Article ID=243450)

The description of these did not precisly describe the above SCANDISK
situation but these were installed anyway.

These did not fix the situation.

THANKS for your time, advise, and help!!!

Jerry