I got the similar problem. First of all, I am using quantum atlas_v scsi hardisk and install windows 2000 professional, that is fine and no problem. After all I installed my old hardrive JTS group PALLADIUM IDE hardisk. For my own reason, I set the com bios boot to ide hard disk and install windows 98. Whenever I want to boot to the win 2k I will set the com bios to boot from scsi and win98 set the com bios to boot to ide. It work quite well until I accidentally write win 2k MBR on to the ide and it won't boot to win 98. I tried to boot from win 98 start up disk and fdisk /mbr but it will give me the message "write protect error, fixed disk has not been updated". I also tried run setup.exe form win 98 cdrom and the message still the same. I took the ide from my computer and put into another computer just one hard disk and boot with win98 start up disk and run fdisk /mbr and install win98 and it run fine and well. After that I took the pre-installed win98 hard drive back to the original cpu and try to boot from ide hard disk but it gave me the message "incompatible version of windows" Please reply, this problem obsessing me about three months and I need windows 98 to run some of my program.

Sounds like W2K is still skulking around on your ide HD. You may have already tried these approaches but try a low level format if your bios supports one. Or alternatively try a program called gdisk. It's like fdisk but quite a bit more complicated and powerful. While your playing with all this, unplug your W2K drive just for safety sake. You'd hate yourself if you roasted your functioning drive's MFT by mistake. Good Luck

I run a Win98/W2K dual boot system on a single hard drive and have had no problems. I can tell you that Win98 likes to be in charge of the MBR. It's not clear to me but are you running two disks? Is that why you change the BIOS setting? A dual boot is quite easy but does require you to set things up in a specific order. Drop me a line and I'll explain it in more detail.