maxtor 200 gig/disappearing files

i put a 200 gig hd in my comp recently. a couple of wks later it ate everything in my "program files" folder. i figured that was because i used the whole 200 gigs and am running win98 se. so, i repartitioned as 120 gigs for c: and 80 for d: but the same thing happened again but in addition to my "program files" folder, a couple of other folders had been completely emptied. i thought win98 se could handle any size hd as long as no partition was over 137 gigs and even then, the worst that would happen would be corrupt files.

if that's true, could the hd be bad. what else. (i'm reasonably sure its not a virus.) thx, maxwell

[Uranium-235]

corrupt files? it could also corrupt your filesystem, which would cause folders to start disappearing. I suggest you move to a operaing system that supports 48-bit addressing, like Windows 2000. Of course, your system bios also has to support it too.

so, you'ld say that its the size of the hd and not the hd itself. need to know whether or not to return it.

[Uranium-235]

Hmm. Before you do, be sure you have your latest motherboard drivers installed. Sometimes bad IDE drivers might cause corruption