gladders wrote:

Hey all, I recently made a post about my current (and first ever!) pc build and troubleshooting. Managed to solve my own problem […]
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Hey all, I recently made a post about my current (and first ever!) pc build and troubleshooting. Managed to solve my own problem. Now I have another, I hope it's permissible to start a new thread for it.

I'm trying to install Windows 98 with an OEM boot CD. The scan disk reported errors on drive C (presumably because I used a third party programme on Windows 10 to format 126GB as FAT32), but rather than spending an age rectifying cluster by cluster I thought I'd chance it by going straight to Setup.

Setup installed files, rebooted, then I get a disk I/O error. I read somewhere about copying the contents of the CD to drive C using XCOPY, but the rudimentary DOS on the disc doesn't have XCOPY.

Any ideas? Is the drive's bad clusters the cause? Something else? How can I get past this?

thanks

How big is the hard disk(not the partition on it)?
On the bios the disk geometry is properly recognized?
Is the drive able to work on another computer?

160GB is the size, broken into two FAT32 partitions.
How do I tell if the disc geometry is correct on the BIOS?
And yes, I had an external HDD chassis which I can connect to a USB and it works fine...at least until the PSU for the chassis crapped out today :'(

I don't know what kind of a build is this, but since you are dealing with Windows 98, I assume, your systems BIOS should be capable of autodetecting HDDs. Is it detected by the BIOS correctly? Is LBA enabled? IS your BIOS capable of working with HDDs larger than 128 GB? 120 GB is a not so rare BIOS limitation of PII/PIII era. Pentium era is even more restiricted with 32GB BIOS limits. Sometimes they cannot work with HDDs larger than 128GB (or 32GB), even while BIOS seemingly can detect it correctly.

I suggest you to use a tool like Seagate Seatools and configure your HDD as a 128GB one.

By the way, if this is not a geometry/recognition related problem, and if you have really bad sectors in it, you really need to mark them with scandisk or something like it, before doing anything else. A few randomly placed bad sectors is acceptable (although they generally mean your HDD is close to its life's end). If scandisk finds clusters after clusters of bad sector blocks, then it is more possibly you have a geometry problem (if not a very very bad condition HDD).

Now the mobo won't detect the HDD at all 🙁 I'm going to find a sata HDD at my local shop today.

gladders wrote:

Now the mobo won't detect the HDD at all 🙁 I'm going to find a sata HDD at my local shop today.

wait a second, how do you plan to hook up the sata HDD?
was the other one sata too?

One that's acting up is IDE. The board has SATA ports too.

Found an older small 40GB IDE in the end which worked.

gladders wrote:

One that's acting up is IDE. The board has SATA ports too.

Found an older small 40GB IDE in the end which worked.

beware that earlier sata ports may not work with newer drives.
But its nice that you managed to find an ide one.