I really hope you guys can help. I've had this problem for months now. What happens is this:

I notice some files start changing to strange characters. They cannot be deleted except through dos sometimes or by scandisk. This eventually spreads to my program files, shutting them down and finally windows. I have to reformat the C drive and reinstall windows. I'm good for a couple of monthes than it starts all over again.

I have been running Norton antivirus but nothing is ever found. I finally ran PC-cillin found Troj_bridgeA. This was deleted but I found nothing in the registry that I was supposed to find with this virus. msconfig shows nothing that shouldn't be there. I ran Trojan Hunter. Nothing was found. I'm stumped.

Something which may or may not have some bearing. This started a month or so after installing a 200GB hard drive, also after reformatting the C drive I have been using my old hard drive to recopy windows and all other C drive contents.

Any help would be appreciated.

So, I gather that you purchased a new drive, then after formatting and installing an OS onto it, you proceed to copy your old system files to the new drive. I was going to say, it sounded like a bad drive, but since you purchased a new one, it probably isnt that. Why not format / install the OS on the new drive, then hook your old drive up as a slave, and scan it for viruses, spyware, adware. Do an intensive scan with every popular scanner, then once the drive is completly clean, copy only files that you need.

Also, I am pretty sure you cant use that large of a drive in Win98 without using a third party partitioning tool. What type of hard drive is it? And how are you partitioning the drive? Are you using Win98 to partition? What sizes are your partitions? If you use western digital hdd, they provide a free tool to partition a large drive in older operating systems.

Thanks for the quick reply.

The hard drive is Maxtor DiamondMax. I downloaded their utility for formatting for Win98. I have it split into four partitions. One 15GB, originally for the operating system. Two 75GB drives and one 35GB. I set it up just as you supposed formatted, installed OS and copied the system files and everything else from my old drive. After my problems started and I had to reformat, I hooked up my old drive and copied the entire contents of my C drive over to the newly formatted drive without installing windows first. Two files couldn't be copied because they were in use so I did it through dos.

I was trying to avoid reinstalling a lot of my software.

Do you think this may be what is causing this? Or might there be another hardware issue causing the hard drive to act this way.

The mysery text looks like binary text(if I'm using the right term) when I delete it through dos, hearts,musical notes, and other strange symbols.

I will do as you said with my old drive. Scan the hell out of it and see if anything comes up.

Any other thoughts you may have I will give them a try.

Thanks a lot for your time!

Greg