can anyone tell me how to run the hardrive from dos or check to see if its working. thanks!

Get hold of a win98 boot disk from bootdisk.com. Create the boot disk. Insert the boot disk in the fdd of the box you're resting. Start that box. At the a:\ type c: If you can access it yo will see c:\ or similar.........

thnaks !! will it only work with a windows 98 boot disk.!

You need to use a Windows 98 (98, 98SE, ME) boot diskette, as it will be able to recognize most OS's and "see" the C: drive. It will not work on some XP, NT systems depending on the File System on the C: drive. A DOS or Windows 95 boot diskette will not "see" the C: partition if it is greater than 2GB. But even with an old DOS diskette, you can run FDISK to see if FDISK can see the physical drive and its partition table. This tells you that BIOS can access the drive and read the first sector. Seeing the data and files is a different problem that requires the right file system support. That is why the Windows 98 boot diskette works best. But for XP and NT you would need a set of boot diskettes for their file system.

thanks agian.!!:)