Make sure you have the blue end of the IDE cable plugged into the motherboard.
Listen for a high pitched clicking noise from your HDD, you may have a "deathstar" GXP60
Try another disk anyway if you have one.

adama wrote on 2020-11-11, 17:38:

but it completely freezes when copying large files between hdd partitions.

Are you using Windows Explorer? Does the same thing happen when you use XCOPY on the command line, for instance?

It is well-known that Windows Explorer in 98SE with IE6 installed will hang during some file transfer operations.

Cables seem fine, drive doesn't seem broken, though I might swap to something else to see if it just goes away.

It sort of does seem to be just in Windows, though it's a bit harder to get an indication in DOS. Copying Win98SE files from CD seemed to be as fast as I'd expect.

Running ATTO i get ~5MB/s Write speeds and ~60MB/s read speeds. Trying to run Sandra's storage benchmark has taking quite some time... 😁

Have you installed the chipset drivers and enabled DMA in Device Manager?
60MB/s isn't indicative of a hardware issue and Windows 98 is plenty fast for working with files if the setup isn't garbage.

Yeah, installed the recommended via 4in1 for the KT400.

I did just try HDAT2 on the disk, and it says it has a SMART alert, which might explain it. Lets try another disk! 😀

Did you use the unofficial Windows 98SE SP3 package? If so, those are some of the same exact things I was experiencing after installing it.

The Deathstar HDD is also highly suspect.

The unreliable deskstars was 60 GXP and 75 GXP. 120GB GXP not these and regard any hard drives as something to break, no matter what.

The one sound you should listen for when any hard drives begin to fail; is "tiak-tiak" which is two back and forth head seeks twice every time computer attempts to access, once you hear that, back up quick what you have not backed up.

Cheers,

The drive in question isn't one that was part of the Deathstar debacle, but it is a drive that was used in a 12 disk storage array for a great many years, so it has a lot of hours on it.

I've never seen quite this kind of behaviour by a drive before. It's a strange half-failure state.

Swapping to a 40gb seagate i had on my desk seems to have fixed the issue.

Long hours on hard drives will wear out regardless. Do not do that by reusing them from long hours.

One time I bought 3 used hard drives one Hitachi, two seagates which were all 2TB range; all were enterprise and seller didn't state how heavily they were in use. All 3 showed performance issues and that "tik-tak" started to show.

Broke them down for analysis and two of them had FDB bearings worn out that disks wobbled too much.

Cheers,

Yeah, these disks got a lot of vibration too, since they were screwed into drive cages with no shock absorption. Pity, this was one of the only ones of those disks that actually still worked without clicking! 😀

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-11-11, 20:45:

The Deathstar HDD is also highly suspect.

I know. But ironically, it's the best performing and most stable HDD type my Power Mac G4 ever saw. 🤣

I am waiting for my Deathstar to die 🤣 it has had bad sectors for over 15 years by now and it still refuses to give up. So I figured I use it as my testbed for OS and driver experimentation. Formatting is agonizing because of the long “kggg kggg kggg” scraping sounds but it doesn’t seem to gain new bad sectors. So, I just go against all advice and keep using it 😅 (but I image it regularly).