Ok, i managed to fix the crashbug by doing a fresh install of DosBox, but I still cannot fdisk the drive, as DosBox doesn't seem to support "rebooting" and crashes or freezes when MSD6.22 or FreeDos try to restart.

I followed the tutorial on how to create drive images and mount them in dosbox, and that worked. But No matter what config I try, I cannot get anything to format a disk image. fdisk from freedos reports that there is a 0 MB hard drive fdisk in PCDos 7 just crashes and fdisk in MSD 6.22 crashes with …

If I were you, I'd drill a couple of holes in that deathstar and toss it out into the trashcan. They are notorious for failing, and that grinding sound was probably from it and not the quantum. Quantums are generally loud, but I have never had any of them fail on me (some of my Quantums are over 10 …