The other day I installed a Western Digital 20.0GB 5400RPM Hard Disk into a Windows 98 based PC. Fdisk the hard disk (went ok), formatted it (went ok) and then booted into windows. Once in Drives C and D were both displayed as hard disk and E as Cd-Rom. If I tried to write anything to D blue screen of death would appear, yet C was fine. Dropped back into to Dos and could write to D fine.

Strange you may think. After a lot of playing about with the master slave settings and swapping IDE channels I ran Fdisk again. The new WD drive was spot on but the C drive was showing as a non dos partition. Thinkin oh crap hard disk has gone down I restored pc to orignal state. The hard disk was still non dos but was fully functional in Win98.

Would like to hear views about whether this non dos partition could stop windows from seeing the new drive.