i've recently started to get a few shutdown/restart hangs on my 98SE setup, likely related to it being an ACPI install (the CUBX-E board doesn't seem to offer any BIOS options to disable it, so that's what it installed as), and probably due to me neglecting to run scandisk wound up with some GUI corruption first and ultimately an unbootable windows that would show the "invalid system disk" error. i ran a disk verify on this u160 atlas v drive via the 29160 with no errors and then attempted to fdisk /mbr from the 98SE CD, which refused to work. just running fdisk itself would also throw a read error.

i swapped in another drive to see if fdisk would work, same behavior, except for one time where it strangely did run it. anyway i decided to ditch the 29160 for a 2940UW and that ran fdisk /mbr just fine, was able to boot into 98SE after sys a: c: from bootdisk and get data off the drive, and reinstalled 98SE over the previous installation, after which everything appears to be working fine again. now my question is, how can fdisk simply fail to run just like that on the 29160? i noticed the bootdisk does list a couple of ASPI drivers that predate this controller, could they have interfered somehow? i don't really care too much about ditching the 29160 as it barely does anything for practical performance vs. the 2940UW.

also considered a potential termination issue, which would be strange as the system worked fine for quite a while with the 29160, and AFAIK the controller is supposed to warn about termination problems as well. the terminator just says foxconn/SCSI and has a 2000 date code, can it be inferred that it can also handle U160, or does this only apply to LVD marked ones?