ok heres what happened - i was booting up win98 as usual and when the windows desktop came up on screen i got an error message something along the lines of "the windows registry is damaged and windows needs to be restarted to repair the damage" so i restarted and when it booted up scandisc came up and started to scan the drive but it stopped straight away and said something like "part of the disk partition/boot sector is damaged and csan disk cannot run. so i had to power down and when i started up windows would not boot and now i have found that neither windows or my bios is recognising my C: drive. This means that i cannot run my virus scan disk to clean it if its a boot sector virus as theres no disk to scan. All that happens when i boot up is that after a while trying to boot the boot prompt comes up and i have the option of booting from a floppy it also means that when i run fdisk or fdisk/mbr from a bootable floppy it comes up with the message "no fixed disks present" if you have any idea what could be causing this i would be very grateful(could the leads connecting the drive be damaged)

It sounds like the hard-drive may have failed. If you open up the PC and then turn it on can you hear any activity from the drive? Interrupt the startup and go into the BIOS and have it re-detect the hard drive. If the BIOS can't see it either the hard-drive has failed(most likely) or the IDE controller has failed(less likely).

Who is the manufacturer of the drive. Whoever it is, goto their site and for example, if it is a westren digital hard drive, you'd want to download the Data Lifeguard tools (depending on the model#) First, if poosible you'd want to do a bios check on the drive. If thats OK, run the diagnostic test. If it comes up with an error, do a low-level format (write zero's to the drive) do another test. If the system still doesn't see the drive, most likely, it's an electronic or mechanical defect, in which case just toss it.