Your kind assistance is requested.

CASE HISTORY:

A friend has a Shuttle HOT-557 motherboard based
Classic Pentium 200 based system (64MB EDO, 1.2GM
Maxtor, Matrox Millenium II, Matrox 3D card, HP4C
scanner with provided SCSI card, USR X2 modem).

Upon installation of a FAT32 partitioned, newly formatted
2.1GB Seagate, the system choked on SCANDISK and
Norton SPEEDDISK, advising of a problem with the first
FAT table being incongruous with the second FAT table.
The proffered fix didn't work.

I took the Seagate home, put it in a clean system as a solo
drive and low level formatted it, FDISKed it into one primary
FAT32 partition, and ran an uneventful SCANDISK. Took it
back and installed the drive in the Shuttle-based PC.

The system choked on it again, so I removed the drive but,
upon rebooting, the system hung up with a Windows
Initialization Error. I rebooted, went into safe mode, exited,
re-booted but got the same error. I suspect a corrupted,
unidentified driver.

I cruised the Shuttle Website and it appears that a BIOS
upgrade fixes a problem with Large Hard Drives. I've
rechecked the Seagate, works fine back at my bench.
2.1BG seems within the non-large (though over 504MB)
category. The HOT-557 has LBA support (no EZ Drive).

QUESTIONS:

1: How should I cure the Windows Initialization Error?

2: Will the flash BIOS upgrade indeed cure the drive error?

3: Anyone with a Shuttle Motherboard experience this?

I wish to proceed with low impact corrections here, in view of
my friend's data and the quagmire endemic to providing
pro bono assistance. I can and would flash the ROM BIOS.

Thanks, in advance, for your astute observations and well
considered advice.

Regards,

John Chin

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