-> Hi TOM.

->  ->>  WC> It WAS the OEM Windows software that trashed the drive.
->  ->>  
->  ->>         I doubt this unless as a coincidence the mechanics of it 
->  ->> got wrapped at the same time.

->  TW> He has to be leaving something out. Teh only way I can see it 
->  TW> doing anything is if it is a Custom OEM CD that some Manfacturer set 
->  TW> up to be "Self Installing". I have never come
across a Generic Win98 
->  TW> CD that did that al lby itself.

-> Oh yes, Windows DOES do that!  :-((  If it fails to see the drive for any
-> reason, it believes there is no data to be careful of and starts the
-> installation with FDISK.  The only way I've been able to recover those is to
-> move the drive to a NEW system that sees the full size of the drive, then zero
-> the partition table [MBR].  Actually, I zero the first 10K sectors for good
-> luck, as it only takes a minute and I am confident there's NOTHING that will
-> get read into the system when the drive gets back on it's old MB. 
 
Yup :-(
I can use the CD drive on the motherboar I/O and the hard drive on 
a Promise I/O card but it's no longer seen :-(

-> If I read all of this correctly, Wayne's system now no longer 'sees' the drive
-> at all.  If this is true, he will most likely have to put it on a newer system
-> first that will 'see' the drive just to be able to zero the MBR.

Even Linux no longer sees the drive on the Promise I/O
card good out to 137 Gig.

Last I saw of the drive it was listing it's size as 85 Gig while
in fact it's a 65 Gig drive.
Such is what the original release Win 98 fdisk did to the hard drive.
                                                                     
Now nothing sees the drive at all.
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5