For what it's worth...

I tried ZAPping the drive and that made no difference.

I put the HDD in another PC. The same noises occurred and all attempts to access the disk failed.

I popped on another HDD -- one of my own -- onto the PC with the noisy HDD. I was able to successfully format and start installing Win98 without incident.

I'd call this done, but since my own HDD was a Maxtor HDD, I had to set TWO jumpers on the drive. I don't think there is that kind of an issue on this older drive, but by switching to a newer HDD, I had to set the cylinder limiting jumper to get the older BIOS to recognize it. (The Maxtor is a 30g, vs. the Quatum which is a 13g.)

Anyway, I think it's the HDD...

Cheers,

Mike...

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