Hello. I've tried installing a WD Caviar 21200 hard drive (1.2 Meg) on an Asus VX-97 Motherboard with a P166MMX chip on it and 32Meg Ram. Now, the motherboard detects the drive properly (only without jumpers on it. If I put a jumper on Master, it won't detect). So the HD detects, I put in my win98 boot disk and when I get to drive C I get "Invalid Media Type". Setup tells me I need XXXXXXX number of bytes free so I know setup is not seeing drive C: Is the drive bad or are there settings I'm missing. The person I got it from says it was trouble free for them.

Perhaps the drive had linux or some other file system that the Windows 98 bootdisk doesn't recognize. Run FDISK, delete the partition, then recreate it as a FAT 32 (answer yes to large disk support) or FAT 16 partition. After the new partition is created, reboot the computer and then format the drive. See if that doesn't do the trick. -Michael

I've got the drive finally set up but now when I run setup and scandisk does a check, I get an error in the "media descriptor" which tells me that it can't read a certain block and something about LBA or logical block address. The person before me ran NT on this drive. Any thoughts?

Download this diagnostic/repair file from Western Digital; http://www.westerndigital.com/service/ftp/drives.html Diagnostics dlgdiag.zip - August, 2001)

Try booting from a win98 floppy disk with fdisk on it and type fdisk /mbr several times (6-8) to clear the master boot record. I know this sounds absurd but it DOES work. Try it.