I have had problems with a Maxtor 5.7 gig drive  running off a on  board
controller on a FIC 503 + board. The driver wouldn't recognize the Maxtor
as a LBA correctly and caused me no end of grief in Windows 98 with GPFs .
Neither Maxtor or FIC acknowledged this but other users confirmed my
suspicions. After three months I pulled the drive and replaced it with a
Seagate which solved the problems. The Maxtor is now running happily off a
ABIT BX6 on board controller as a slave to a Seagate.  This is the first
time I have seen a compatibility problem between a hard drive and a modern
controller / motherboard / BIOS.

Because your problem apparently arrived with the Maxtor I would suggest you
temporally swap out the drive , install 98 on another manufacturers drive
and see if you still have a problems.

m


>     Ok, just recently (although i have had a new 27 gig MAXTOR UDMA drive for
>about a month) win98 has started reporting a "yellow question mark" in DEVICE
>MANAGER for my Primary IDE controller.  WHAT THE?!?!?!?  It claims that is
>has been dynamically disabled.  This is becoming a recurrent problem.  I just
>overlayed win98 yesterday because of the same problem and it was fixed for 24
>hours, but then it started again.  If i overlay win98, it corrects theproblem
>for awhile.  is there any possibility that this problem is spurned by a piece
>of software?  What on EARTH COULD THIS BE?  The tech at Best Buy checked out
>my hardware and the diagnostic determined everything on the motherboard to be
>A-OK.  Please help if you can.  -Drew Watson

                         PCBUILD's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>