I have a machine using the "Maxblast" drive overlay software to support a large hard drive. After reformatting the boot partition and reinstalling Windows 98SE, Windows fails to start (hangs), apparently on trying to load M5229.MPD, the Acer "PCI Bus Master IDE Controller" driver. I can start Windows in safe mode. If I uninstall the IDE driver and refuse to install it when prompted, I can start Windows normally but all drives are in "MS-DOS compatibility mode". So it appears to me that there is some incompatibility between the (use of the) Drive Overlay software and the (Acer) Bus Mastering IDE driver. The "noide" registry key is *not* present. Anyone have any insights into this one? Some details: Machine is an old Aptiva 2153. The Primary IDE master is an 8Gig Maxtor HD with a 40Gig Maxtor slave. "Maxblast" (Maxtor's version of EZ-Drive) was installed on the first drive to allow the second drive to be used to its full capacity. The first drive is partitioned in 2 4Gig volumes, the primary one being the boot volume. The second drive has one 40Gig partition (all FAT32 of course). This was working until something got messed up on the first drive. I reinstalled the drive overlay using the latest ver. from Maxtor, "Maxblast3". Reformatted the boot partition and reinstalled Windows using the Aptiva recovery disk. Like I said, when the "ALi M5229" driver gets installed, the machine hangs on restarting Windows. The geometry of the partitions looks consistent with the translation provided by Maxblast. Appreciate any help on this one... JW

You may want to check IBM's site for an upgrade to M5229.mpd. Or, I believe you can use microsoft's ESDI_506.pdr instead of the mpd file. There is an updated version of ESDI_506.pdr here: ESDI_506.PDR