I had this issue and it was caused by my CD-ROM drive - if you have one installed then try not loading the driver and see if that makes a difference. If it is that, then there's a little app that resets a CD-ROM drive and that fixed it for me. CDBEQUIET or something like that? Thanks, disconnecting …

Hi, I got the same problem, even worse because HDD LED is active since power up and only go off when Windows 98 is fully loaded, so DOS 6.22 or 7.1 in command prompt makes HDD LED stuck at active ..and it doesn't matter if I load any program or search in folders it's just shining red.