Hi. I have an old 425MB Hard disk in my computer with Windows 98SE. In the BIOS, Fixed Disk Mode was always disabled. When I enabled it, the bootup seemed to go a LOT quikcer than before, so I thought to myself: great, a faster system. But near to the end of the win98 bootup, I get a different error each time, mostl revolving around a "Windows Protection Error". Then upon the next reboot, the registry checker will automatically run and restart my system. It will do this each time until I change Fixed Disk Mode to DISABLED in the BIOS. The Hard disk is FAT32. Any ideas, because I would really like this faster disk, its like so slow without this fixed disk block mode thing. Thanks, Alex

540 meg is the minimum for fat32. I don't see how you could have fat32 on a 425 meg drive. Is it a compressed drive? By fixed disk mode do you mean the LBA, CHS or auto mode by the HD identification or do you mean the block mode? Assuming the latter, enabling it allows multi-sector transfers instead of one sector per transfer so it would be faster. But not all HDs, especially older ones, can utilize this feature. By all means disable it if it is causing errors.

I managed to use FAT32 on my 425MB drive, because I used a Freeware prog called Ranish Partition Creator(or something) and it worked well. (jus clearing that up!) Al

My best guess would be your HD is not capable of block mode transfers. Or maybe the third party partitioning interferes when those transfers are attempted. Best thing would be a newer HD or you might check the performance tab in system properties, then file system and adjust the read ahead optimization of the HD. I don't know of any specific Windows setting for adjusting block mode transfers.