Customer seems to have had many strange problems (over the years), with his windows 98 pc.

He has had an F: drive appear mysteriously (zero size & 100% full), not able to properly install windows onto his 60Gb drive (he can only create a 2gb partition)… anything larger will work for a while & then “dissapear”. He has had viruses & spyware in the past, but he has fixed up those problems himself. The PC also has a SCSI CD-writer…

He is starting to think that there is a malicious “entity” on the internet, which will attack his computer as soon as he goes online.

He has also had many “experts” work on his computer, reccomending lots of different things (upgrade the motherboard, get a larger hard drive, a faster video card, reformat & reinstall windows).

I take a look & see a 2gb fat16 partition, and about 58GB of unpartitioned space. So after a quick look at the system, I partition up the remaining 58GB… and then format the partition, which give me a 58Gb D: drive.

I restart the PC & the 58GB drive is unreadable…windows allocates it to the D: drive letter, but gives an error when trying to look at the contents…

Some research shows that fat16 is limited to 2 GB max. Fat32 is more confusing: it can support drives up to 125 GB, but windows 98se can only safely make use of 32Gb! but applying a microsoft “patch”, allows it to use 62Gb… and maybe 125Gb (if the wind is NWW & the moon is full 😉 .

I try out the patch, re-partition the 58Gb, re-format & re-create the D: drive, & everything works just fine, even after multiple restarts.

I talk to the customer, & he is happy for me to re-format the whole drive (as long as I backup his data… it all fits onto 1 CD: easy)

So using microsofts “improved” fdisk, I create a single 60Gb fat32 partition, boot from floppy, install windows 98, Install antivir & anti-spyware measures. Install a network card, connect to the internet, and I just get the usual (occasional)windows 98 freeze, otherwise it runs just fine.

No bizzare behaviour, so I give it back to the customer & ask him to try it & let me know if anything unusual starts happening.