New HD causes Windows to hang.

Operating System Microsoft Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222A (Win98 SE)
Motherboard:
CPU Type Intel Pentium III, 500 MHz (5 x 100)
Motherboard Name Intel Warm Springs WS440BX (1 ISA, 5 PCI, 1 AGP, 3 DIMM)
Motherboard Chipset Intel 82440BX
System Memory 384 MB (SDRAM)
BIOS Type Phoenix (11/04/99)
Storage:
Floppy Drive GENERIC NEC FLOPPY DISK
Disk Drive C WDC AC31 3500D 13.5 Gigabyte

Driver Description Ultra66 IDE Controller
Driver Date 8/20/01
Driver Provider Promise Technology

Motherboard and Ultra66 BIOS updated to latest.

Installed a WD 1200JBRTL 120 Gig Hard Drive which I partitioned into two 60 gig drives, formatted and copied drive C to drive D in DOS using Data Lifeguard Tools Version 11.1.

When I boot, the Ultra66 startup page shows:
D0 WDC AC13500D LBA 12949MB Ultra DMA 4
D1 WDC WD1200JB-00GVA0 LBA 114473MB Ultra DMA 4

Windows Normal boot either hangs, finishes and hangs or finishes and I can see all three drives in Device Manger, but any program, i.e. My Computer, Windows Explorer, Data Lifeguard Tools, etc. that tries to access a drive causes the computer to hang or at least operate very slow. In that case the Hard Drive light flickers about every ten seconds, never comes on like normal. It takes more than 30 seconds for Ctrl-Alt-Delete to show the Close window and then it hangs.

Windows booted in the Safe Mode allows me to access all three drives, copy files from one to the other and do a reformat on the new drive.

Removing the old 13.5G ‘C’ drive and booting from the new 120G ‘D’ drive operates much the same.

Any ideas?

 

If it really is the HD causing the slow down it could be the large partitions causing problems. Windows 98 is getting old and is going to cause some problems with this, since you're stuck with fat32 for your filesystem. Although fat32 does technically support partitions that size it does a really bad job of it.

Unless I have a really good reason I'll pretty much never make a partition larger then 32GB's on fat32 because that gives a cluster size of 16KB. Which is already four times the size it would be with ntfs. At 60GB it's going to be either 32KB or 64KB cluster size. Which is getting really large and is going to slow things down.

So I guess my suggest would be to either split the drive into four partitions to keep the cluster size at a more managable level or upgrade to a newer OS. Windows 98 doesn't do a great job with bigger HD's.

 

That is certainly easy to try. I will do it tonight.
However, why is there no appartent problem when running in the Safe Mode?

 

No joy.
Repartitioned to four 30 gig drives. Copied 'C' to 'D'. Still hangs in normal mode, in Safe Mode I can access all five drives and copy files between them.

 

If that's the case it sort of leads me to believe it's not the new HD causing the slow down at all. If you just remove the new HD at this point and boot up normally does everything run fine?

I'm really not sure what would be causing this.