DJW <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote

> Bad Hard drive or doing something wrong?

The way to distinguish between those two possibilitys is to run
Seagate's diagnostic on the drive and see what it says about the drive.

More below.

> I bought a used Seagate Medallist 8641 St38641A 8 GB hard drive on ebay.

> I installed it in a Compaq Presario 5204 desktop machine.
> Partitioned it with Seagate's latest edition of Disc Wizard
> on two floppies made from a download from their site.

> All was going well got windows 98SE on it and it booted but as
> soon as I started putting applications back on it and restarting
> between each install at about 212 MB of data on it, it failed to boot.

Exactly what happened when it failed to boot, exactly what error message ?

> Redid it all again and the same thing happened. So I put my old 4 GB
> Seagate that came with the machine back in and reset the jumpers on
> the 8 GB to non on for slave and as my computer manual says also
> set a jumper to cable select to set and put it in the slave position.

Are you using the original ribbon cable ? Those Presarios are unusual
in that they use cable select which was unusual for PCs of that vintage.

> Did the partition and reformat with disk wizard. Started to load more
> applications on it and somewhere along the line it gave me a warning
> at restart that the disk may be damaged. It ran scan disk I guess in
> the blue screen DOS mode and when it gets to cluster 121,289
> about of a total clusters or 1,048,864 it slows to a ridiculous crawl.

Thats because its retrying on dubious sectors.

> And starts to say that portion of the disk is bad and locks out for use
> that section and I guess moves the data to a new area of the disk.

Nar, just marks the sector as bad at the file system level.

> However this is continuing on cluster by cluster and I ran
> it all night maybe 15 hours and it got to cluster 150,000
> (something) and is still locking out the areas as bad.

You can get that effect if the drive isnt setup properly in the
drive table in the bios, when its attempting to access parts of
the drive that dont even exist because the wrong data is used
in the drive table. You should be using the AUTO entry there.

> Now With Seagate's disk Wizard it installed
> Dynamic Disk Overlay to I guess both hard drives

No, it only gets installed on the boot drive tho it may well be
on both drives because both have been used as the boot drive.

> in order to see the full 8GB of the slave.

Yes, thats quite likely.

> I believe way back at first when I tried to use the drive as the primary
> it only saw like 2.1 GB of the drive until I ran the Disc Wizard application.

> The question in all this is do you think I have a bad
> hard drive somewhere at 200 MB and beyond

Quite possible and the best check for that is to see
what Seagate's diagnostic says about the drive.

> or is it that the computer being a 1998-99 manufactured
> motherboard still can not use the larger capacity.

Very likely, but the DDO should get around that. Thats its purpose.

> In my computer folder set to view as web page it show 8 GB for the
> size for it. I have purchased a few used IDE 8 to 10 GB drives on
> ebay that are on the way do you think I will run into the same problems.

If the problem is the motherboard/bios, obviously.
If the problem is with the drive itself, obviously not.

> And will or should I use Seagate's application to partition and
> install the DDO again. One is a Quantum fireball with is now
> supported by Maxtor, which is owned by Seagate as the
> information I see on line about who owns and supports who.

I havent bothered to check if Seagate's Disk Wizard allows for that yet.

> Am I basically doing something wrong? Have I missed a step or done a
> redundant conflicting thing? Or do I just maybe have a bad Hard Drive?

See above.

> One more sideline question of many and it only happens when I am not doing
> anything to or on the slave but I hear it spin down to off is that normal for a slave?

Yes, the default is to spin down a drive on inactivity with SE. You can change that in the settings.