If you think a hard drive is failing, address the issue yesterday or sooner!

Yeah, that's where I am. Close to being a day late (at least I'm not a
dollar short).

I don't know of any problems with Win98OE and any particular brand of IDE
hard drive. I have installed enough Maxtors to know if there was one.
Firewire and USB-2 support might be a problem, but for internal drives, they
are irrelevant.

The only serious issue is BIOS support for hard drives 16 GB or 40 GB.
Most hard drive vendor's consumer-pack hard drives come with a utility for
copying the contents of hard drives, that address this issue on the fly.

Thanks Arny. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the hard
drive could care less what OS is being run. It says it's a system
requirement on the Maxtor box. maybe that's for the
guide-you-through-the-process help that comes with it?

Either way, it's no big deal, as I am going to get a 40 GB drive, and
if it won't work on the IBM, I'll put it in the Dell. I have already
backed up every file that I can fit on floppys. There are two
databases that are huge, though that I have not been able to back up.

the BIOS, is there any way I could check? Again, this is not
critical: I am going to get a replacement PC anyway, and if the Maxtor
doesn't work on the IBM, it'll go into the Dell. The Maxtor drive is
an immediate short-term fix. I cannot believe how the prices have
fallen. 40 GB is $49.