I installed a 71.2 Gig Western Digital Caviar 172AA hard drive using WD's EZ Drive utility, slaved it to my master drive, transferred the data (including a partition to partition copy), and was ready to have it as my new primary master drive. It booted up successfully with the Win 98 OS, but when I shutdown the computer, Windows 98 actually powered down the whole PC, when it never done that before with my old hard drive. Now, the PC will not power up with the WD drive in it. I put back my old drive and it does power up. I was wondering if the Win 98 shutdown affected it. It did power up before, until it went through the Win 98 shut down.

Correction, that's a 17.2 Gig hard drive, not a 71.2 Gig hard drive. Sorry for the typo...

Does the bios see the drive OK? When you say it doesn't power up with the new drive, do you mean it acts like a dead computer or do you mean it won't boot into windows? Even though it powered up once, it sounds like a connection or jumper problem. Either that or the drive has gone bad.

Well, the bios no longer recognizes the drive. In fact, it doesn't even go into POST when that hard drive is plugged in. When another drive is plugged in, it does go into POST and boots up. Just for kicks, I have the PC boot up with another drive and then I plugged a power lead from the power supply into the "suspect" drive (while the PC is on, it shuts down the whole PC, as if I flipped off the switch...strange). I know, not good practice, but I just wanted to see if the drive would spin up while the PC was at least on. I had another spare drive and transferred all my data, then master/slaved the two and it all came up fine again. I tried to reproduce the problem, by simply shutting down, but this second spare drive came up again. Now, I switched the slave to a master, but forgot to remove the master jumper settings on my original master drive, and when I powered up the PC, it seemed to kill my original master (there was only 8K left on the drive, so it was running very slow and suspect i n the first place). My original drive (the one with 8K left) doesn't even power up anymore. I just transferred my data in time, and I'm only down to one drive, which is what I'm using to type this message on. Too strange that I can kill two drives within 24 hrs. Hmm, must be me...

It's not a good idea to plug in hardware when the machine is running. I should have mentioned that an HD cable on backwards can cause some motherboard to seem 'dead'. But it didn't sound like that was the problem since it seemed to only be happening with the one drive. You may want to check that though.