Insufficient Memory?

[SpankYou]

Hey,

Well yesterday I went to format my hard drive, previously it had Windows 98 2nd Edition, but everytime I tried to format, I got the error "Insufficient Memory", baffled for a while, I found that if you delete the partition (in my case it was my primary partition) then create a new partition in its place, next time you go to format the hard drive there shouldn't be any problems.
I found that this seems to be an increasingly occuring problem with Windows 98 2nd Ed. So thought I'd post this as a tip if anyone was having similar problems.

Cheers

Sam

 

[Dreamland]

No reason this should be happening unless there was something odd about the previous partition. How large was your HD and how large was the original partition? The drive may have been using an overlay scheme (usually from the manufacturer) if it was formatted a few years back. Most people are not aware that their drive is/was using an overlay and encounter problems when the necessary files are deleted. A corrupt partition table may also cause something like this, but I'm sure you would have noticed that well before you decided to reformat.

Overlay schemes were used to overcome older BIOS or O/S limitations, but a lot of them ended up on drives that did not need them - the 'drive setup' floppies that came with the new drives were pretty confusing. Maxtors early disks often ended up with unnecessary overlays because users were using the default partition/format choices on the setup disks.

There may have been a way to continue using the drive with the overlay, but in the end you're better off blowing it away and use the 'standard' MS partitons and formatting routines anyway.

The point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with the Windows 98SE FORMAT command, itself. You were able to overcome some *other* problem by deleting and recreating the partition, but it shouldn't be assumed that it's always necessary or somehow related to Win98 (if that's what you're suggesting). My guess is that you probably would have got some other type of error message if you tried to reformat the old partition with ME/NT/2K/XP or a utility like Norton instead of 98SE.

 

[SpankYou]

Hey,

Well the drive was 40Gb and just the one partition (using FDISK), I formatted the drive about a year ago (it was part of a comp I built), then 2 months down the line the computer was riddled with bad sectors, but before I got the chance to format or sort the problem out the motherboard blew, 3 months down the line the online supplier (I would never use again) sent me a mother board after losing the old one. Anyways I got the comp re-built and working again formatted the drive and carried on as usual, now 4 months down the line from that the computer booted up worked for about two minutes (if lucky) and crashed everytime. Again I run scan disk riddled with bad sectors, so I'm not sure how this keeps happening. I know this is a bit beside the point, but may give someone an idea of whats going on.

I agree with you when you say that had it been any other operating system then an error on the format would probably have occured, and I agree with you when you say that there is nothing inherently wrong with the WIN98 FORMAT command, all I meant to say was that this particular error (from what I have researched) seems to be increasingly happening with 98 2nd edition systems, and this is just a way that seems to sort the problem.

Hope this clears things up.

Cheers

Sam