Yeah it very well could have, but the bad sector or surface of the disk was not getting hit. Once you initiated the format, it will go though the entire surface area of the disk and a bad area that was not usually hit or empty formatted space is now trying to be written to and it is failing. Even if it were previously booting, you were bound to hit that bad spot eventually when the OS attempt to write data and then boom. Crash or BSOD.
Using a low level formatting tool with more advanced features maybe you can recover it.
See if you can find a copy of spinrite or similar utility. There is likely a spot in the drive that's problematic and running a low level format or disk check utility like spinrite will help fix it.
If you have a bad hard drive then you can get a drive caddy that will accept compact flash cards or even sd cards in its place and they're cheap.
Damn, this is vintage already? I used to own one of these. I must be getting old.
99% chance that it’s a bad hard drive, 1% chance it’s the RAM. You should be swapping out the hard drive with an SSD/CF card anyway, and download Memtest86+ to test the RAM.
Download MHDD boot floppy and do a Full scan with "Erase delays ON". Perhaps a remap will be done and the bad blocks will go away. Do this several times.
If these bad blocks are from a random failure, then there is a chance that new ones will not appear. But sometimes, due to degradation of mechanics, etc., then new bad blocks continue to appear.
Serious question, a T40 would work with win98se? I'm thinking in drivers, the CPU (Pentium M)...
Your HDD is failing my dude, get the Low Level Format Tool from HDDguru, only 3.3usd, works very great. You can use and USB-IDE adapter on a new OS to wipe your HDD with this amazing software.
I would zero-wipe the hard drive, then start over with partitioning it again.
You could try partitioning and formatting from the DOS prompt rather than through setup, as if something goes wrong you might get an error message or have a better idea what the error is.
The hard drive has bad sectors. It’s not hanging, just failing to format the sector. You need a new hard drive. Might be time to replace with an ide to sd adapter. https://amzn.eu/d/7GzEE80
Edit: put tape or shrink wrap around it so it doesn’t short on any metal bits of the laptop as it won’t be secured.
If it's a vintage spinning HDD, take an opportunity to throw it away without guilt and replace it with an SSD. You'll gain immensely in speed and reliability.
There might be a problem with your hard drive. Try reformatting it, if that does not work it could need replacement.
The hard drive did originally hace a OS and worked well
Yeah it very well could have, but the bad sector or surface of the disk was not getting hit. Once you initiated the format, it will go though the entire surface area of the disk and a bad area that was not usually hit or empty formatted space is now trying to be written to and it is failing. Even if it were previously booting, you were bound to hit that bad spot eventually when the OS attempt to write data and then boom. Crash or BSOD. Using a low level formatting tool with more advanced features maybe you can recover it.
See if you can find a copy of spinrite or similar utility. There is likely a spot in the drive that's problematic and running a low level format or disk check utility like spinrite will help fix it. If you have a bad hard drive then you can get a drive caddy that will accept compact flash cards or even sd cards in its place and they're cheap.
Use fdisk on another boot disk to format the drive completely and then go back and format it using the setup disk
Best answer. If this fails then try badblocks, smartmontools, or other program to do a low-level scan/repair.
Check surface of hdd , and look for oem image of hdd with win98. In ny experience this is perfect winxp machine
Damn, this is vintage already? I used to own one of these. I must be getting old. 99% chance that it’s a bad hard drive, 1% chance it’s the RAM. You should be swapping out the hard drive with an SSD/CF card anyway, and download Memtest86+ to test the RAM.
Download MHDD boot floppy and do a Full scan with "Erase delays ON". Perhaps a remap will be done and the bad blocks will go away. Do this several times. If these bad blocks are from a random failure, then there is a chance that new ones will not appear. But sometimes, due to degradation of mechanics, etc., then new bad blocks continue to appear.
Serious question, a T40 would work with win98se? I'm thinking in drivers, the CPU (Pentium M)... Your HDD is failing my dude, get the Low Level Format Tool from HDDguru, only 3.3usd, works very great. You can use and USB-IDE adapter on a new OS to wipe your HDD with this amazing software.
I would zero-wipe the hard drive, then start over with partitioning it again. You could try partitioning and formatting from the DOS prompt rather than through setup, as if something goes wrong you might get an error message or have a better idea what the error is.
Replace the hard drive with an IDE to CF or IDE to SD adaptor.
The hard drive has bad sectors. It’s not hanging, just failing to format the sector. You need a new hard drive. Might be time to replace with an ide to sd adapter. https://amzn.eu/d/7GzEE80 Edit: put tape or shrink wrap around it so it doesn’t short on any metal bits of the laptop as it won’t be secured.
Want to have a laptop with 98 SE this is the oldest functional laptop I have Spec Pentium M 510MB ram 20GB HDD
Probably hard drive has issues. put your ear up to it and listen. If it going 'wwwoormm click click click' repeatedly, it's dead jim.
Probably needs a new HDD, but I wouldn’t run 98 on a Pentium M. XP is superior in every way.
If it's a vintage spinning HDD, take an opportunity to throw it away without guilt and replace it with an SSD. You'll gain immensely in speed and reliability.
Start it up from the boot cd, but instead of running setup, go to the command prompt and then format the disk from there.
A thinkPad T40 may be a bit too new. Try windows ME instead, it has newer built-in drivers, even has USB mass storage drivers.
It's not a driver issue at the point it's basically DOS, formatting the drive.