Gurney -

Unless you can confirm something specific wrong with your hard drives, there's no good reason you should be losing files, or should need to keep reformatting and reloading the OS. Even if you're getting data loss or corruption, it may not be the drive's fault.

Win98SE was a fairly decent operating system in its time, but that time really is long gone. WinME is really nothing but a sort of hyped-up Win98, and has the reputation of being the worst OS produced since Windows 1.0 - and hardly anyone even knew that 1.0 ever existed.

If you can install Win98, and it runs until you try to make a dialup connection, your most likely problem is with your modem. Win98 is a bit short on handles, and IRQ and DMA conflicts were very common if you try to let the infant Plug-N-Play in Win98 make all the assignments. It was very common, in my experience, to have to force both IRQ and DMA assignments manually with almost any equipment addition. I can recall a modem, a sound card, and a second hard drive that I added that each required multiple manual swaps in assignments to find non-fatal combinations of conflicts. With Win98 limitations, you can't actually get rid of all the conflicts if you've got much more than a single Hard Drive and one floppy.

Possibilities:

1. Your salvaged hard drive may be intended for use with an EIDE controller and you still have an older IDE card. Not likely, but it would perhaps give erratic drive operation. We'll assume that when you reformatted it you used FAT16 format(?).

2. Modems are extremely variable as to what's the correct driver, and a dash number change on the model may require a different driver than another of the same basic model. An EXACT match is often necessary, and if your blue screen comes up only when you try to dial up your ISP an incorrect driver would be a prime suspect - even if it says right on the wrapper that you've got the right one.

3. Many hardware devices from Win98 era were hardwired to use a specific IRQ and/or DMA assignment, and Win98 didn't always assign them to the correct one. If you got two devices hardwired to the same IRQ, there'd be no way to resolve the conflict. Some devices could be switched with card jumpers, and a few could be "software assigned," but in most cases there were only a couple of choices for each device.

4. If your Win98SE was up to the latest specs when support was discontinued, it should be INT13H and INT21H enabled, but your BIOS might not be. This would (or could) cause Hard Drive access problems, although it should be okay with small partitions. I don't remember what the partition size limits were, since they were sort of moving targets during the time I used Win9x much.

5. A frequent cause of blue screen with Win9x is a memory assignment conflict. One device/program writes into the space that should be reserved for something else, so the one that's obliterated just stops. Although Win98 wasn't too bad about it, occasionally a device would write outside the RAM space it was assigned. ANY memory chip failure usually just craps on everything, so nothing runs; but a "weak" section can sometimes drop just a few bits, sometimes intermittently. If it happens to be in the range assigned to your modem, that might explain why dialing is fatal.

6. Since the blue screen seems to happen when the modem turns on, it's possible that the modem is assigned to the same RAM space as something else. This certainly would cause instant death.

If my memory was better, I'm sure I could add another half dozen possibilities for Win98, most of which would NOT be caused by your hard drive.

Of the OS versions you indicated that you have, my preference would be Win98SE. None of your versions is supported now though, and most of the holes are pretty well known; so Win98SE isn't really "safe to drive" very far on the internet.

My honest advice would be that you really should get WinXP - Professional. If you really must WinXP Home is better than Win98, but is more than a little deficient compared to the Pro version. I doubt very much that your current machine is really capable of running any WinXP version satisfactorily though, so ideally you'd be looking at a moderately capable new machine with WinXP Pro preinstalled by the builder. To run WinXP at all well, you need a minimum of 512 MB RAM (1 GB much preferred) and should have at least a 60 or 80 GB hard drive. Minimum processor speeds are specified, and you shouldn't crowd the minimums, although there are few sellers handling anything that slow - that I've seen.

For the most part, should you decide to move up to XP, you should NOT attempt to salvage much in the way of old hardware, since most if it probably won't be fully compatible with XP. You also are likely to find bits and pieces of favorite software that won't work with it. Diagnostic and test programs that you may have probably won't be of much use, but won't be that much of a loss since virtually everything you'll need is built into WinXP. You just have to find it when you need it. (Admitted - not always easy.)

John