ok here is my problem a couple of weeks ago i had a problem with my computer detecting the second hardrive. it worked fine for about a year before this and then it crapped out on me. i tried to play with the jumper settings and that didnt work either. then i tried to switch the where the drives were on the IDE cable thinking that it might be something wrong with the connection. when i did this it told me that it was unable to find an operating system. so then i thought that it was the IDE cable. so i switched the one with the cd rom and tried it and got the same thing. i then put everything back to normal and now the computer will not boot up and tells me that an operating system is still not found. oh yea the second hardrive does not have any operating system on it and is a slave drive. i thought about trying to use a boot disk or the windows 98 cd to boot it up but i dont want to loose what on my hardrive if at all possible. System specs PIII 450 voodoo 16mb video card sound blaster live 13gig master IDE drive 30gig slave IDE drive NEC 8x master DVD player TDK burner (slave) any help would be appreciated because i am at a dead end. Thanks Drew

Jumper the drive with Win as master and put in it IDE controller 0. 2nd drive jumper as slave on same IDE. Boot into BIOS (usually DEL or F1 or F10 key or whatever it tells you on boot to "enter setup.") Should be a hard drive utility in there where you can detect HDDs and settings. Orginal problem may have been just a loose cable or failing hard drive. Booting with boot disk will not harm any files (unless you use a format or delete command).

Try removing (disconencting) all IDE devices from your computer except for your primary hard drive. Make sure the jumper settings on the drive are correct - some drives are different for Master and Single. Also, be sure to unplug both the data (ribbon) and power cable from the other hard drive. If one of your IDE devices has gone south, hopefully not your boot drive, it can cause recognition problems on the other IDE channels. If that's the case, your PC should be able to "see" the drive and boot from it once the other device is gone. You might also want to go into the BIOS and make sure that the drive is being detected by the motherboard. Next, start adding the devices back and rebooting the system, one by one, until you either have the whole thing working again, or reach the failure point. If nothing fails then you're good to go. If something causes your system not to be able to boot, then at least you have a good idea of what you need to replace. Also, I have seen and heard of problems related to having a burner and a CD or DVD drive as master-slave on the same channel. Just as an experiment you might also want to try to configure your devices as follows: IDE0 - HDD1 (m)- DVD (sl) IDE1 - HDD2 (m)- CDRW (sl) Windows will still make your hard drives C: and D:. Also, if you boot to a floppy or CD with Win98 on it, it won't cause you to lose the contents of your drive unless you allow the CD to start reinstalling Windows. You can stop it way before that happens. Plus, if your system can't see your drive, Windows wouldn't have anyplace to install to, so it would tell you no fixed disk available or something similar. If you boot to a floppy, make sure the floppy has fdisk.exe on it. You can use fdisk to see if the partitions on your drive(s) are readable. Good luck!

thanks a lot guys unplugging all of the drives worked. It was definetly doing some weird stuff. oh well it works now thanks again Drew