I forgot to mention the Dell D233 is a 233MHz Pentium II system with 64MB of ram currently. The hard drive is a 6GB IBM and the BIOS is the latest A09 version.

I just found the specs for this drive online

IBM DHEA-36480 6.4GB IDE
Interface: 40 pin IDE (UDMA 33)
Capacity: 6.4GB
Speed: 5400RPM
Cache: 476K
Access Time: 9.5ms

What a horribly small cache! Is this common for a UDMA 33 drive?

Just get another drive, IBM drives were commonly known back then as "Deathstars" due to failure rate.

I might have a 30GB Maxtor somewhere... I ran the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test on it and it only found bad sectors so I'm doing a low-level format right now through it. I'll most likely replace the drive anyway, but at this point I'm just curious. A 270MB Quantum Maverick had a 128kb cache so I might be able to use a drive overlay and pop it in a 386 or something. But still a 400k buffer on a 6GB drive? Why was this thing made?

nforce4max wrote:

Just get another drive, IBM drives were commonly known back then as "Deathstars" due to failure rate.

That was the 60GXP and 75GXP models, which came along a bit later than the drive in the OP.

The sad thing is I just got that Deathstar reference. Desktar=Deathstar. Nice. I figured this one wasn't a Desktar. I decided to bite the bullet and do a fresh install after the low-level format, but it did the same thing. I think the bad sector issue was straightened out by the format so that can't be affecting it. I thought maybe it was buffer related, but I think I'm just really caught up on small buffer sizes because I didn't notice those things at the time. I played the Windows 3.1 version of KQVII on my old 386's 100MB Quantum which had a much smaller buffer to be sure (Oh the load times). I'm going to clone the IBM over to a 4.3GB Quantum Fireball since my 30GB Maxtor is apparently a crashed drive that I still have for no reason.

Well I'm stumped. It did the same thing on the Quantum Fireball too. It doesn't seem to be related to the sound card, memory or hard drive. When I was changing over the drives I saw that two of the DIMMs weren't fully seated. They still passed a memory diagnostic earlier, but I figured memory errors can be weird... The funny thing is that if I installed the Quantum in my Pentium MMX system it would probably run Baldur's Gate, etc. fine. It has to be either some kind of weird problem specific to this system. The Windows 98 disc was a scratched hand me down that someone tried to Disc Doctor so maybe it's an OS media issue? I guess I'll have to install DOS and run the DOS version of KQVII to see if it has sound issues and if not I can try my other Win98 discs which are in better shape. TBH I had an unresolvable Win98 issue with the XPS M200s too. If all else fails I can always use the parts...

mrTentacleguy,

Please try use Spinrite to try revive the hdd sectors.
They may be soft errors that are correctable, it is better then just replace the disk and throw the bad one out.

The Hitachi Drive Fitness Test located the bad sectors too. It gave me the option of trying to restore them or mark them bad for the low-level format. I just assumed marking them would just make it effectively a smaller drive. I chose that option because I was in a hurry at the time (several hours of various diagnostics kinda wore me out). I'll have to look in to Spinrite. I'd never dispose of the drive in the shape it's in. At worst I'll set it aside as a future project. I don't usually recycle drives until they crash hard.

The weird thing about this whole ordeal is when I installed Baldur's Gate on my 200MHz Pentium MMX I got the same audio problem, but KQVII didn't have any problems. I then went back to the D233 and changed the midi output device from Yamaha to the MS Software Synth and KQVII's sound smoothed out. I did notice on the Dell that under device manager there is an alert for a resource conflict, but there are no conflicting resources and it has an error 15 on the PNP OS device. The MS site was very amiguous about this and said it may be nothing and I could possibly ignore the error. I installed the latest chipset drivers I could find from Intel and the BIOS is the latest so I'm not sure what I'd do about that. I even disabled plug and play OS in the BIOS, but nothing really changed then either. I got mad at a Blue and White Mac G3 that I bought broken and dispersed it's ram among my other systems, so now this system has 512MB. Online it said the D233 maxed out at 384MB so I figured it wouldn't recognize all 512MB, but it did so now I need to lower the amount of RAM a little so Win98 stops wigging out with 512MB installed.

It turns out all of my Infinity Engine games have this problem on all my older computers (which all have ISA sound cards). I bought a PII-450 recently and it had the same sound issue with Baldur's Gate until I installed a PCI Audigy, then the sound was great. I'm going to pick up a PCI YMF724 and try it in everything later, but I'm pretty sure these games just don't like my ISA sound cards for whatever reason.

A very good PCI Sound Card for the late DOS / early Windows games are the Vortex 2 based cards. They come with a wavetable header, which also works in DOS, very good DOS compatibility and work fine under Windows 98.

Not sure about later Windows Games (Windows XP, EAX support and all of that).

In general DOS: ISA, Windows: PCI

If you only use a single card it's always a compromise, e.g. ISA Sound Card is great for DOS, but as you found there can be issues with Windows, and with PCI Sound Cards they are great for Windows, but some DOS games don't like them, especially the very old ones, the newer ones have much better drivers that work with anything that's remotely Sound Blaster compatible.

I think I vaguely remember being forced to switch to a PCI sound card in the Win98 days, it's just been a while. I've actually had my eye on a Vortex card, maybe I should pick one up. 😀