A little background on the configuration here: I have a Asus P5A SS7 system setup using both the onboard IDE and a Promise SATA TX2+ which has two SATA ports as well as an additional IDE channel. To my knowledge, there are no hardware conflicts. Connected to the onboard primary IDE, I have/had a 32GB CF card running Windows 98SE. Connected to the onboard secondary IDE, I have a ZIP250 and a DVD. On the TX2+ card I have a SATA SSD running Windows 2000 SP4 and then the drive I am/was having issues with, the 80GB Seagate, is on the IDE channel.

I initially setup the Seagate drive with two partitions, one FAT32 for Windows 98 to use for data and paging, one NTFS for Windows 2000 to use for data and paging. Everything seemed to be working great for a few months, granted I was really only using Windows 2000 during that time. Even when I initilly switched over to 98SE for some DOS gaming, things seemed to be going well until my CF card seemed to start flaking out. Windows 98 would start booting and then freeze on the splash screen. Pushing reset (or CTRL ALT DEL) restarted the system but the CF would NOT be detected again unless I did a hard power off and then back on. Of course Windows 98 wanted to run scandisk after these failed boots but interestingly it kept finding problems and wanting to run a surface scan with the Seagate drive and not the CF card. Completing the surface scan left me with about 128MB worth of bad sectors on the Seagate. Running chkdsk in Win2K showed the same bad sectors on the FAT partition (the NTFS partition came out clean).

Here is where it gets interesting. SMART checked out OK on the drive. I attempted to wipe and repartition the drive but after deleting the partitions, FDISK (both the DOS6 and Win98 versions) would not recognize the full drive capacity. They were seeing it somewhere in the neighborhood of 10GB. GParted in Ubuntu 10 said the drive had an invalid partition table, but could not correct it or make a new one! As a last ditch effort, I started up OnTrack Disk Manager and thankfully it had no trouble making new FAT32 and NTFS partitions for me. DOS Scandisk now declares the FAT32 partition to be error free! Win2K chkdsk surface scan verifies no errors in the FAT partition and again finds the NTFS partition to be good. There was some swapping the drive between the onboard IDE and the TX2+ IDE during this process and I have taken the CF card out of the system pending replacement. I am afraid to put it back in!

Now can someone tell me what the heck I just went through? I want to get back to my Redneck Rampage game!