I have two concerns; (1st concern) is the message that I receive on startup which reads;
WARNING: Dells’s Disk monitoring System has detected that Drive 1 on the primary EIDE controller is operating outside of normal specifications. It is advisable to immediately back up your data & replace your hard disk drive by calling your support desk or Dell Computer Corporation.
Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility.
What I've continued to do since I received this PC is to use the F1 key and proceed and so far it's has been working OK. (Haven't been able to correct concern with setup utility). What this PC is used for is basically to listen to music in the garage during the warmer months and have not had a problem so far with either drive. Drives A:, D: and E: have music on each but nowhere near full.
This is generally issued by the relatively crappy SMART disk monitoring that was/is built into the BIOS software; I had a PC that if I enabled SMART it would refuse to boot and simply say "Hard disk failure" or a similar message, and yet it worked fine for several years (in fact, the drive never actually up and failed, I've been atypically lucky on that count, however, only having a single drive fail that was 12 years old). As Allan says, you could run a disk diagnostic; but if you don't have any important data on the machine, it's not something you should be terribly concerned about. (In fact, you're question seems aimed at making it ignore it; you can do so by disabling S.M.A.R.T in the BIOS, sometimes labeled as "disk monitoring" or something similar).
I decided to bring it in and see if I could get some help with this thing before it failed. I'm thinking that it's the partitioned drive that's the problem and I'm wondering if that's the problem (partitioning)or perhaps the drive is on it's way out? If it is, it's been working this way with the above message for quite a while.
S.M.A.R.T is designed to be preventative; it's tolerances are set rather low, and really if you get a S.M.A.R.T error of some description, all you really know is that the drive will fail eventually, which is pretty much a given with any drive. (That's why a hard drive should ideally never have the only copy of something, because that will exponentially raise the chances you'll goof up and somehow mess up the drive or that it will fail, it's a known law of physics
).
My (2nd concern) is with the USB's. Can't get Flash Drives to work. If I plug in a Flash Drive it will light up but it's not recognized either in MyComputer or in the BIOS. After Googling I was instructed to download a USB Win 98 SE driver(which I did). Still nothing. I've also plugged in my external drive to try that. It lights up and attempts to run but that's about it.
Windows 98SE had very rudimentary support for flash drives; specifically, unlike windows 2000 and XP (and I think ME, not sure) it didn't have a "class" driver for Mass storage; a "class" driver can basically work with any device that identifies itself as that class of device; for example, USB joysticks, keyboards, and mice are all identified as HID class devices, and use the same driver.
Thankfully, there are ways of adding support for it. try the drivers listed
here, they work great on my 440CDX (~1996 or so).
BIOS support for USB a few years ago was relatively basic; usually you were lucky if you could even use a USB keyboard before the OS booted. There was no provision for booting from the drives, for example, and because the various device classes weren't really all that well defined the motherboard/BIOS manufacturers didn't bother with any sort of Bus enumeration (actually, Windows 95 was essentially the first PC Operating System that was widely used that supported that at all) Basically, this just means that you'll be getting a far slower speed (the ports are definitely USB 1.1) and you won't be booting from any flash drives on that computer, either. It works a treat for transferring files... especially when your CD-ROM drive refuses to work like the one on my ancient laptop
