My computer starting going to hell many months ago after downloading some really crappy free ISPs. Finally at the end of August it wouldn't work. Couldn't reinstall my DOS disks or anything. So I take out the hard drive and put in this hard drive from a computer that someone down the street was throwing away. I don't know hardly anything about computers, but after I put that hard drive in and was then able to down load my MS-DOS 6.22 disks on there, I thought I was a real bad-a$$. (that feeling didn't last long). So then I decide to configure the hard disk following the procedures in my MS-DOS book. Problem for me was sometimes it gives you options and how the hell is a dummy like me supposed to know which way to go ? (I always knew learning to read was a real bad idea- what you don't know can't hurt you). In particular, it gives the option of " making the partition the maximum size". So I thought " Hey, the bigger, the better, right ?" So, that's what I did; created a Primary MS-DOS Partition and made the partition the maximum size. ***I have no idea if this is what I should have done***So, after that I formatted the Hard disk, then reinstalled the DOS crap. Tried to install my soundblaster disks, but on the 3rd disk or so, a message came on saying there's not enough memory. Gave up on that. Then installed windows 3.1, cause my win 98 cd is an upgrade disk. Had to get win 3.1 off the net, cause one of my disk was crappy. The win 3.1 I downloaded said it was for NEC computers. My computer is an Everex. Don't know if that matters. One problem I remember after getting win 3.1 on, was that whenever I clicked on a help button, a message came on saying there wasn't enough memory to show the help stuff. Ok, so then I put my win 98 upgrade on. It seemed to go ok, except when I tried to convert to FAT 32, it said something was wrong(Wish I remembered exactly what the message was). Then tried the Soundblaster disk again, but same problem as before.(says there's not enough room- But when I look at properties, it says there's a lot of room on my C drive.) Finally I was able to get back on the internet, but there's some goofy stuff going on with my computer. It's slower than it should be. Sometimes colors change and get weird. Sometimes even Psychadelic looking for a few seconds (I'll happily sell this computer "as is" to any Grateful Dead fans if the the price is right). often everything freezes and I have to restart. The reason I wrote all this is because I'd like to start over. But I'm not sure what I should do differently next time. If anyone can point out anything that stands out as a red flag, please let me know. Thank you.

hello The first question is why you make a partition maximum size. just format your computer and don't make a partition at al. Just put your OS on the c: drive. I think the problem is you don't know how to work whit fdisk.

Ok, first of all, and it's been said before, FORGET ALL ABOUT INSTALLING dos and 3x. FORGET it, ok? Did ya do that? Now, do a search on THIS SITE and on GOOGLE and on PC911 for tutorials on how to install W98. Download or otherwise make/obtain a bootable disc for W98 that will read your cdrom, and fdisk and format using the newer W98 stuff NOT dos 6.22. (visit www.bootdisk.com and do some reading) Then run W98 setup, and when it prompts you for proof on where the original istall (w3x) you should be able to provide that by inserting one or more discs as it asks for them (I've never done this using floppys, just W95 on CD) FORGET dos FORGET w3x. I believe the ONLY important files that are NOT on your w98 CD upgrade are things like format.com and possibly fdisk. Other than that, anything that needs to get installed concerning W98 IS ON THERE!! (See on the left of this webpage where is says "how to's"? http://www.fixwindows.com/win98/ http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto.html http://members.aol.com/axcel216/98-1.htm ""If you try to install the Win98 Upgrade on an empty disk/partition, you will be asked to insert the Setup cd-rom or floppies that contain an older version of Windows/WfWG. Win98 Setup checks for ANY: WINSETUP.BIN, PRECOPYx.CAB and WIN_95xx.CAB files supposedly located on a Win95/OSR2 install cd-rom, and/or for Windows/WfWG 3.xx install floppies. If you have any of these cd-roms/floppies, you can copy the installation files to a directory on your hard disk to speedup the search."" The above in quotes came from the URL above the quoted paragraph. All this took me about 3 minutes on GOOGLE to find.

Thanks for the responses.

If you suspect that the problem with your original hard disk isn't physical (i.e. mechanical, damaged sectors) then try putiing it back in and configuring it the old way. Make sure you have a bootable DOS diskette (Win DOS 7/8 is still DOS, too!) handy with the system files + fdisk, format, sys and label utilities on it. Then start the machine with the diskette in drive A; Get into the FDISK menu and delete all partitions on your (original!) HDD, then reboot with the same diskette. Using fdisk, create a primary DOS partition, set it active and ... reboot! Then FORMAT C: /S /U to format and transfer system files to the new DOS disk. Now re-start the machine without the diskette in drive A: and see how it went. I don't think that the out of memory error or the failure to convert the format to fat 32 has anything at all to do with it. Out of memory often means you've run out of 640K conventional memory (you don't have the line in config.sys for loading Device=C:\Himem.Sys). As for the conversion, Microsoft utilities require the disk be at least 513MB is size before making or converting a disk to FAT32 format. PartitonMagic, another third-party disk utility requires all FAT32 disks be at least 266MB in size. That seems to be the minimum "safe" size recommendation for such a filesystem.

Never move a hard drive with Win 9XX up from one computer to another. The problem is that the setup does not match. (Go to settings>control panel>System and select DEVICE MANAGER.) The trouble is that most of the things listed there DO NOT MATCH on the new computer. I have moved hard drives successfully and I have had the computer quit. Runing slow is one of the in between things this can cause. (This part is a Windows Question) With MS-DOS 6.22 or earlier selecting the largest partition is no problem--or 2000 even is better. However, if you are going to run DOS 6.XX you cannot select large drive support or make a partition larger than 2.047 Gigabytes. With large hard drives this is a problem. The best solution if your drive is large is to run just the DOS portion of Windows 98 on large drives.

Your first red flag should have been that you friend was throwing that hard drive out. Find out why they were throwing it out. It could be a bad drive, and therefore not worth the time you're spending on it.