Possible hard drive failure on ThinkPad 770 after installing Battery MaxiMiser and Power Management?

[armanicollezioni]

I was busy installing drivers for my ThinkPad 770 for the ENTIRE day, and I was having trouble on several so it took a while.

When I finally got pretty much all my drivers installed, I went to the fun stuff, and installed the Battery MaxiMiser and Power Management application for Windows 95/98 (I thought it would be rather helpful to install that application too because I've got three working batteries for it, and I plan to use it for DOS applications/games on the go). After I did that, I rebooted my ThinkPad 770, and it was just stuck on the Windows 98 loading screen. For a while. I even let it run while I went and picked up my medications and came back. After half an hour, it was still loading. I'm suspecting it's hard drive failure because I put 96MB of RAM inside my ThinkPad 770, which is, in my opinion, rather excessive for anything I'd ever be installing or doing on it. Also, Windows 98, with the regular 32MB of RAM inside my ThinkPad 770, boots in about 35 seconds.

Could this have something to do with the Battery MaxiMiser and Power Management program or did my hard drive just quit on me? I hope not, because this happened at 7:30pm, and I've been setting the dang thing up since about 11:00am.

I'm only asking this just in case something could be done about it, so I don't have to go out and pay $28 for a 2.5" IDE SSD, when, in actuality, the hard drive still technically works. It's the original 5.1GB IBM Travelstar hard drive.

[MikalE]

Have you tried Cntl-Alt-Delete?

I don't know why those programs would've crashed your drive. If it's bad, it's probably just a coincidence.

You have nothing to lose by re-booting it.

[armanicollezioni]

Have you tried Cntl-Alt-Delete?

I don't know why those programs would've crashed your drive. If it's bad, it's probably just a coincidence.

You have nothing to lose by re-booting it.

Yeah, I did it three times, I gave up when it hit the 30 minute mark recently and it still didn't load.

[Bondi]

Did you try to boot in safe mode? Just need to press F8 right after POST and in startup menu up choose Safe mode. If it bots up you can try to uninstall the unnecessary software.

[JBUK]

Can you connect the HDD to another machine to check it out for bad sectors and any SMART data clues.
I used to use some DOS tools on a dos boot floppy in W98 days to check HDDs out. A couple come to mind: PC Doctor disk tool and HDRescue. There was an IBM disk fitness tool(DFT) as well.
It might just be a W98 instal failure - this is not unknown..............

[MikalE]

I forgot about that. It has happened to me more than once. After a second install it ran fine on those occasions when that happened.

[armanicollezioni]

Did you try to boot in safe mode? Just need to press F8 right after POST and in startup menu up choose Safe mode. If it bots up you can try to uninstall the unnecessary software.

Sorry for the late reply, I did that today and it's still stuck on the loading screen.