I am not planning on using XP as I don't have a legal copy of one.
That is why I went '98 and I must be honest YES I did monkey around inside with the cable wires to make sure that they were secure.
I only have 96 MB of RAM Intel corp. PD440.....motherboard Pentium 11 processor (it is old that is why someone gave it to me) but it did have WinXP plus Windows Office 2000, FrontPage, etc.
I turned it on this morning and because it wasn't turned off properly I got the message "data error while reading FAT entry for cluster 4294901760 prevents scandisk from fixing drive.
I try getting into safemode and this comes up "fatal exception OE 015F 0000000015
It reboots and then I get INVALID LONG FILENAME unable to fix.
It tells me to run Windows scan but I can't get in now. I try normal mode and get 0E 015F 00000009 and the other one is 015F BFF72170.
If nobody can help then I will start all over again! Thank-you
What caused the bad shutdown?
Have you run the drive manufacturer's diagnostic bootdiskette over the drive and run MemTest86 overnight to see if there are any memory errors?
This hard drive of yours is getting a bit old and might be on its way out. My last drive broke down after four years.
Or maybe the controllers are going.
If you use a '98 bootdisk and enable CD-ROM support will the drive read a CD?
Or maybe it is just time for a newer laptop with XP ?