Recent content by Dreamland

Removing and reinstalling in device manager should not affect the disk itself, PaulAlexander. I think your problem lies in the BIOS, hoever, and the way it is interpreting the logical layout of the disk. Win98 depends on the BIOS to accurately report specifics about the disk - it probably won't...

Diggar - what happens when you take the second IDE channel (your CD ROMS, etc.) and connect only the Maxtor to it? Hard jumper the Maxtor to 'Master' and make sure it's on the outer connector of that cable. Obviously not a permanent solution, but I'm wondering if your BIOS is forcing PIO mode...

The boot sector and partition table will already be buffered in either disk by time the loading routine for the O/S is called, assuming the disks have both spun up and initialized. UDMA speed will be rather inconsequential for delivery of the first few sectors. You will notice a difference...

Dick - IBM has a set of drivers for the dock's hardware. Much of it was probably recognized by 98 already (serial, parallel ports, LAN, etc.) but you will need to dig up the drivers specific to the USB port for that docking station. They are not the drivers written specifically for the 380ED...

It could still be thermal in nature, metrevor. The power supply is least stable when it's hot. The CPU, drive controller and southbridge are most suceptible to voltage fluctuations when hot themselves. It is possible for the whole system to be fairly stable for long periods of time but be unable...

Did you use the IBM (OEM) ThinkPad version of Win98SE, or just a generic version of SE? Does your Hardware Profile (Control Panel) show two profiles - one for docked and one for undocked? Does it recognize when it's docked?

System restore monitors changes to your drive all the time, not just during startup. It's most active just *after* startup (when you are seeing the slowness) so you might actually try disabling it for a day or two to see if it's related. 3GB is also a pretty beefy chunk of drive to set aside for...

OK, so you're saying that when the machine is 'cold' it will boot up fine. Once it starts running, it keeps running. But if you try to reboot it after it's been running a while, it hangs? Sorry for the questions - I just want to make sure I understand when the problem is happening.

How big of a hard drive? How is it partitioned - one giant one or ? You can just about always get more performance out of XP by using a few smaller partitions if you have a drive over 20GB. And if you're using NTFS on a particularly large drive, the problem becomes worse as NTFS spreads files...

So are you able to get it to eventually boot by restarting it a few times? How fast of a CPU? What kind of hard drive?

Try the Linux forum, JWattIII: http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=619&newpid=619

Works for me, but I'm a partition freak. I generally go overboard with partitions, dedicating one for each O/S, one for a common SWAP/TEMP space, one for programs, one for everything IE related, one for documents/data/mail and a couple at the end for archive and backup. This is overkill for most...

Just a guess, KedarWolf, but you may want to take a look at the BIOS settings if you have not done so yet. There's ways to turn off write-caching at the IDE hardware-controller level independent of the O/S or drive controller on some mobo's in the BIOS. You might boot off the Maxtor utility...

What file system - FAT or NTFS? Does a CHKDSK or SCANDISK run clean?

I'll second Ed's thoughts - even if the mobo and/or drives can be coaxed into working again, they will always be suspect. That said, you hadn't said explicitly if you tried the drive by itself on a known good cable/motherboard or the DVD by itself on a known good cable/motherboard. That's...