At times when I boot or reboot Windows 98se, it comes up with a blue screen "cannot write to drive c: press any key to continue".
Pressing any key will only give more blue screens and warnings and then the lot will lock up, so a hard reboot is all that can be done.
Sometimes the same problem occurs on the next reboot, but the following reboot will give no problems and things will work flawlessly.
I run 4dos with Windows 98se and I have noticed that it skips loading 4dos when this problem occurs.
Has anyone any idea as to what could cause this frustrating problem and how to fix it?

From a boot floppy, run scandisk and approve the "Thorough" option to check the disk surface. It could also be the controller itself, but maybe just bad sectors.

If some are found, scandisk will mark them so that Windows will not use them. Later, run it again (in a few days). If the number of bad sectors has increased, chances are the drive is on its way out. If not, the problem should be solved for now.

And double-check the connections.

Found a file in the root directory on drive C: called msdos.ini. Checked it and it seemed to be a binary rather than a text file, which is what one would normally expect a Windows/Msdos ini file to be. Got suspicious and removed same and have had no ill effects and problems since. Can anyone enlighten me what the msdos.ini file is, or is suposed to be? According to some sites it is used by Windows ME instead of msdos.sys, but I cannot say any of these sites were very clear on the issue.

Hi, and thank you for your suggestion. Have tried it and unfortunately it seems to make no difference. Interesting thing is everything runs OK in Dos. It appears the problem is not due to corrupted drivers in Windows, as it boots fine after some failed reboots and mostly runs flawlessly boot after boot. I am beginning to get suspicious about my WD hard drive, as it was previously installed in a computer that suffered a power supply and main-board failure, although it tests out fine with the WD SMART utility program. It is of course also possible that it is a motherboard flaw, but this is a bit outside of my league so I would appreciate some help.

Nope, still getting those occasional lockups on booting Windows with "Windows cannot write to drive C:" messages. What a pain. Have done two hard drive surface scans, one with Windows disk optimizer and the other with the Western Digital disk checker. Seems they both slow down considerably at one area when they have completed about 20% of their testing procedure. The Western Digital check seemed to elicit a couple of clicks from the drive; but both programs report the drive as OK. I am totally confused now. Do we have any hard drive experts or anyone else that can shed some light on this? Regards, Paul.