98 Guy wrote:

"Formatting 41,86.65M"

That's when I left the computer (running at my office).
I wasn't going to hang around for an hour while it formatted
the drive. I'll check back later today and see how it
finished the job.

Ok, here's the result:

Formatting 41,86.65M
Format complete.
Writing out file allocation table
Compete.
Calculating free space (this may take several minutes)...
Complete
System tranferred

Volume label (11 characters, ENTER for none)?

238,414.41 MB total disk space
360,448 bytes used by system
238,414.07 mb available on disk

32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
7,629,249 allocation unites available on disk.

Ok, looks good. Let's try chkdsk c:

244,136,352 kilobytes total disk space
244,135,968 kilobytes free

32,768 bytes in each allocation unit
7,629,261 total allocation units on disk
7,629,249 available allocation units on disk

Ok, still looks good. Let's try Scandisk c:

Scandisk ran just fine, performed all checks except surface scan.

Running scandisk without himem.sys being loaded results in this
message:

"Scandisk is unable to check a drive because there
is no extended memory driver loaded on your computer.
To check this drive, make sure that you have a
HIMEM.SYS file on the disk from which you are starting
your computer (...)"

Ok, so there you go. You can use standard tools like fdisk and format
to prepare drives up to 250 gb in size and set them up for
windows-98se installation.

From this point on, I don't want to hear any lusers out there in some
future post say something like "uh, I don't think that fdisk works on
drives larger than 50 gb, or maybe it's 64" or "I seem to recall that
you can't use win-98 format to format a drive larger than 80 gb" or
some other such nonsense.

And to Ssome (the OP who I think started this thread in
microsoft.public.win98.performance) - I hope this helps...