crazy hard drive problem

[Roscoroo]

Ok here's my pain in the tail problem ...

1st set up on this pc
Asus a7n8x-e deluxe
2500+ clocked at 2.0 ghz (for troubleshooting ect )
2x 256 333 ddr
nvida nforce drivers 4.27 international pack
crucial radeon 9600 pro 128  with 4.7 cats , DX 9.0b
OS  win 98se  sp1.5

80 gb western digital ata 7200rpm 100 ide

ok i set it up as a 80gig single partion at 1st and after messing around drivers ect ... it was running fairly well but i was getting a few errors but nothing really to serious . just a few program installing rejects .

so i fdisked and formated the hard drive once I had the best driver package ect figured out and copied to cd

I partitioned  it in two  parts
Available space on drive C: 36331MB of 38152MB (FAT32)
Available space on drive D: 34014MB of 38145MB (FAT32)

now i've done a fresh very carful install of everything .... and befor i added the service pack this error started up again for the 5th time , (ive even tried different partition sizes )

Here is my Error from hell

Virtual Memory

hard disk   -29205mb free

Notice the - minus ... and i cant get it to set up to a + amount even if i try to manage it manually . (such as 1.5x 512 ) or any other amount ae 4095 / 29000 or any thing .  

it keeps defaulting back to this hard disk   -29205mb free amount

it shows the same for the d drive .


ok i used the calandra partion floppy (western digital one ) for the partion ... and ive done partions manually with the fdisk floppy for 98se ... and even tryed my Maxtor partition cd .

 Now befor you tell me that this will never work with 98se ...
I can easily prove anyone wrong because i have a 80gig Maxtor 7200 ata 133 ide hard drive partitioned the same way in the old ladys pc and its been working great for over a year now.
 its also running a nforce mainboard .

any idea's how to fix the virual memory ????? it works ok at 1st then it blows out ...

I'ne also ordered anouther 80 gig maxtor instead of this WD pile of junk . i had 3 hd's in my other a7n8x-x deluxe (all maxtors) and i didnt have this problem at all .

[MOIL]

There is some known issues pertaining to the WD drives and 98se. They can be found at WD's website. I myself use nothing but WD HDD's and have zero problems with them unless I'm setting up a server and need SCSI drives, then I use Segate's only.  Secondly, why on God's green Earth are you running 98 {FAT32}  NTFS would be a much better choice. Unless of course it has something to do with gaming gear, which seems to be the issue I've heard.

[Roscoroo]

its mostly a gamer , and if i owned a copy of y2k then i might go to that ... but id rather run red hat or 98 then win xp ... (xp is nothing but a house for bugs as far as im concerned)

i swaped the hard drive to an older 6 gig maxtor i have and it works fine .. so its got to be the wd hard drive someware in how it alots its bits ect , or how it reads .  

so i'll just have to wait til my new hd gets here .

im wondering if i'm gonna have to make smaller partions though
perhaps go with 3 @ 26 gig  or a 40gb and 2 20's in partition size.

my old gamer has been pushing 20 gig on its primary 20gb hd for over a year and i know i need more head room .

isnt there something about 38gb being the max for 98se in each partion ? or is that just the amount when it goes over and then it miss reads the hd amount in such programs as fdisk ? (ive ran across this befor and a second party partion/format program seams to take care of it )