Not sure where this belongs, couldn't find anything even close on query here or at IBM, and i've never had this problem before. Within three days i've had both my physical drive D: and wife's (just tonight) physical drive D: get whacked. Both are fairly new, and both are used to store "stuff", while the OS and working programs reside on physical C:, here's the script:
Three days ago i had to hotboot out of an email that wouldn't open (whether that is germaine or not is unknown) and on the re-start of course W98SE started it's ScanDisk process, cleared physical C: and got hung up on about 2% of D: whereupon it would not go further, even after two hours. Tried several times, same hang-up. Finally ended up at the DOS-prompt, moved everything that was valuable (13-gig) off of D: and back to C:, then used FDISK to delete then reestablish the drive, formatted it and got going again.
Tonight my wife called upstairs to tell me her defrag wouldn't do her D: drive. I went down to see, and the fetched thing doesn't even recognize her physical D:, although it does recognize the Plextor ROM-burner which is slaved to it (She has Master C:, slave CDRom, and Master D:, slave Plextor CD-RW). Went into BIOS, it is set to detect auto, did the physical hunt and it couldn't find D:, however it does find the CD-RW slaved to D:......
Tomorrow i'll open up the box and check the ribbons & power cords, but tonight i'm wondering if it's a coincidence (never really believed in coincidences...) that we both got our D: drives whacked, and both got an email with huge attachment from the same friend, although she didn't open the attachment like i tried to do.
Anyone got any worthwhile, constructive, ideas, without mentioning *nix?