Can you tell specs of the system?

Motherboard: Intel D845GERG2
CPU: Pentium 4 2.66GHz - not sure of the specific model number
Graphics: GeForce2 MX200
RAM: 512mb

I guess that's the most important stuff. There's also an 82gb 7200rpm HDD in there. And, for the record, I just swapped out the disc drive with a different one, and the problem persists.

Since you didn't change anything in the system when this problem started, something must have failed. I would probably first test both of the drives in another computer and if they work, I would feel that the problem is most likely with the motherboard or the ide controller there. If I still really wanted to use that system and I needed an optical drive there, I would most likely find a pci sata controller card that supports optical drives and try a sata optical drive there to see if that would work.

845 chipset is smack dab in the middle of the capacitor plague era. I'd check the board for any caps that look swollen or leaky. If they all look okay, make a note of the brand names on them and post here as they could still be junk and just aren't showing problems visibly.

I'll have to check it out on the weekend. In the meantime, should I replace the motherboard? I have another one that I was going to use, an MSI MS-6385. The only reason I didn't use it was because it uses RDRAM, which I've never seen before. Otherwise, it's probably more suitable. Will I have to reinstall 98 or, dare I say, will it just work?

My floppy drive started doing something similar one day like that. It would start taking forever for "my computer" or "windows explorer" to open and could see alot of grinding coming from the floppy drive. Once they did open the floppy drive showed a icon that looked like a word document.

Anyways. My fix was to just to go device manager. remove the floppy drive and reboot. Upon reboot the computer found the floppy drive again. No more issues since then.

Maybe a bad file association is what I'd go with.

Also if your using IDE drives make sure master/slave is set!

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

My fix was to just to go device manager. remove the floppy drive and reboot. Upon reboot the computer found the floppy drive again.

No go, I'm afraid. I had to do it in safe mode, 'cause it's actually started crashing on the desktop now. It may well be an unrelated issue, but since it looks like I'm replacing the motherboard anyway, I guess it's not much of a concern.

And I did check the master/slave jumpers, no problems there. It was good you asked because I just remembered they're both set to Master, but I've disconnected the DVD drive entirely so that wasn't the problem.

Alright, quick update (apologies, once again, if this isn't The Way To Do It).

I replaced the motherboard with an MS-6385, and it transpired that the Pentium 4 that went with that motherboard had failed at some stage. At least, that's what the apparent random series of beeps tells me. So I put the GERG2 back in, figuring I could get on without disc drives for the time being. I'm sure .iso files will do me fine until I can put in a proper replacement.

...buuuuuuut, now the computer crashes on startup if DAEMON Tools is installed; Task Manager tells me that 'msgsrv32' is to blame here. I just don't get it. This thing really doesn't want me using discs in any capacity. And, yes, it was installed before: this behaviour has literally just started within the last ten minutes of posting, and D-Tools has been installed since I first set the machine up, and I've successfully mounted and used disc images with it.

Here's another thing, though: with D-Tools gone, my physical disc drive now seems to be working fine. If anyone can explain that one to me, I'm all ears - my first thought was driver conflicts, but since D-Tools has been running fine on its own all this time, I have my doubts.

Is this a new install of windows?
I'm guessing you installed the windows installer 2.0 update?

Which version of D Tools you trying to install? I'm not home so cant check which version I use for Win98 but someone else will let you know a good working version.