Ok, I had to replace the HDD in my laptop. I installed the new drive and was unable to locate my copy of XP so being impatient, decided to try and load WIN98 (I have since located my copy of XP). Everything was working fine during the install, till the laptop rebooted. I wasn't paying attention when it said don't touch anything while it reboots. When the option to boot from the HD or the disk option was given I hit the boot from disk button (I think, it was a few days ago and I am a little foggy). It froze up and I ended up turning off the power. Now when I turn it on the power light comes on and I can hear the cd-rom drive spin, then nothing. The monitor never comes on at all. I have tried restarting it with a DOS boot disk on 3.5 and cd to no avail. If anyone can tell me how badly I screwed up, and how I might be able to fix this I would be very greatful.

did you try booting with the xp cd ? AMD 64x2 4000+ ASUS M2N-E Mobo w/ ultra nforce 570 Arctic Cooling 64 Freezer Pro HS/F w/as5 4GIG of Crucial DDR2 800 6400 2gig x 2 3 SATAII + 1 ide WD 80gig Hard drives 8Mb cache Ant

yes I did try that. All that happens is the power comes on and I can hear the disk spin and then nothing.

disconnect the HD and, try to boot to the bios setup. whatever you did to the HD, should have no effect on your ability to do this. Should be able to do it without a drive hooked up. "Ok, I had to replace the HDD in my laptop" why? larry

I had to replace the HDD because the old one had something internally come loose. I could here it rattling after I took it out. I don't know exactly how that happened. It is an older laptop, and it is possible over time it had just been jarred enough. I tried removing the hard drive and booting, but the screen never comes on at all. All that happened was that the fan started and that was all.

can you connect an external monitor? larry