hello, i posted on the win9x forums and didnt seem to get much help and now that im hoping to get some help here because im pretty sure its a hardware problem, i posted on the win9x forums about my hard drive clicking and freezing up, i tried using killdisk to fix it but it cant dectect my drive c it says theres no fixed drives, so i got a boot disk from bootdisk.com and when i boot with the disk it says............ windows 98 has detected that drive c does not contain a valid fat or fat 32 partition, there are several possible causes 1 the drive may need to be partitioned, to create a partition on the drive run fdisk from the ms dos command prompt 2 you may be using 3rd party disk partitioning software etc blah blah blah 3 some viruses also cause your drive c to not register you can use a virus scanning program to check your computer for viruses blah blah blah to get help type HELP and press enter and now its at the A:\ Prompt i tried using fdisk and it says in white above the prompt NO fixed disks present i asked a freind and he said it might be a serenal virus (boot sector virus) or something and i already took my computer apart and unplugged the cords and everything so i have come to the conclusion that its either a virus or the hd is dead i was wondering if anyone could give me any suggestions or where i could get a virus boot disk that would get rid of the virus or if they can think of anything else that might be wrong and how i could fix it or things to try, any help would be greatly greatly appreciated thanks. p.s the thing that is pissing me off is that sometimes it screws up while its idle, and then when i reboot it it wont work, so two hours later i boot it up and it works fine and works for a little while then starts clicking and freezes up, like tommorow morning when i go to turn it on it might end up working but screw up in 6-7 hours.. anyways enough useless information, any help would be great.

Sounds to me like you HDD is go south on you. If you think you have a boot sector virus you can do a low level format to blow it away. To do this you will have to download the utility from the HDD manufacturer's website.

thanks dave i am gonna try that although im not sure how to do the low level format(the utiltiy will say how?) im also not sure of the hdd model/manufacturers i have the computer open right now and i know very very little about hardware so i think i know what the harddrive is and on the top of its casing(the little round dish) it says its a fujitsu and some serial numbers etc i can get them if it would help, i was wondering if you or anyone else reading this could tell me of a the site or a site with the utility on it so i could download it and try doing the low level format, any help to my above post or a site for the utility would be greatly appreciated thanks.

hi i just went looking for the utility on google and found this post on computing.net http://www.computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/3202.html im wondering which one of these suggestions i should use if any and if the guy who says that ezdrive or diskmanager will screw it up is right.

I suggest you go to the fujitsu site and download a diagnostic. http://www.fujitsu.ca/download/hard_drive.html

I'm having the same exact problems, how did you make out with the low level format? Or did you find out the HD is dead.