Been struggling to get my Win98 machine back stable after a HDD failure. PIII 933, AOpen AX63 Pro mobo, 512mb PC133 SDRAM, Western Digital WD400JB 40GB IDE HDD circa 2008 (bought NOS last week), SB Live! 5.1 SB0100 w/ LiveDrive, swapping between Voodoo 3 1000 / Voodoo 5 5500 to diagnose a separate bottleneck issue, and running a clean install of Win98SE with appropriate drivers, including Via 4.25a chipset drivers with DMA enabled. As I've been reinstalling some of my games, I'll go to defrag via VoptXP between every few installations and encounter an error when trying to analyze files -- sometimes it's crosslinked files, sometimes it's allocation table problems, sometimes it doesn't even say. No matter the issue, it will send me to ScanDisk afterward to check for issues. And each time, ScanDisk will in fact encounter an issue of some sort, usually pertaining to whatever VoptXP mentioned. I started by just truncating crosslinked files, but eventually gave up and allowed it to start automatically fixing issues each time I scanned, as it was happening so often. Problem is, each time it fixes the issues, it leaves one of my games corrupted and unable to either start or run without crashing.

These issues and ScanDisk as a whole are new territory for me. I've been using Vopt defrag software for two decades now with no issues, and I've always avoided boot-up ScanDisk like the plague anytime I had to reset my computers due to a freeze -- it's just never been necessary. But this is the first time I've ever encountered errors like these, and I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing / what the heart of the issue is.

The reason for the new HDD is when I moved into a new house in late January, the Western Digital WD200 that was original with the system seemed to have given up the ghost. The computer was hauled in a blanketed box and lap-carried the whole travel to the new home, which was only 20 miles away, so it didn't experience any jarring. It was also odd, as it didn't seem like the drive wanted to spin up at all, and the BIOS wasn't reading anything. Tried replacing the PCB with one I purchased online, and that did get it to spin again, but not without the head crashing with each attempt (still haven't figured out what happened to that drive). Fast-forward a couple weeks later and I tried one of those SATA-to-IDE adapters with a WD400 and WD2500 I had lying around, but never could get them to run Win98SE stable; the OS would usually crash either during installation, or if I made it all the way through that, during installation of any of my games / drivers or transferring files from media. Gave up on that attempt and went with the NOS IDE HDD, which hasn't been giving me any issues, unless it's the culprit for these VoptXP / ScanDisk reported errors.

I'm at a loss. Any input?