Hi! I have a PII/288 loaded with WIn2K. It was booting fine till last two days I did not install any thing lastly. Last thing I did before the problem started was unplugged the power cable. before that it was working fine. when I have shutdown the machine, the humming sound is gone, but the machine was on. only a little hum was there. So I switched off the machine. Now when I turn it on, only that little hum is there. other wise typical hard drive reading sound use to come. Comming to the problem. When I tried to boot, it started hanging. it shows the big white compaq screen with logo. Thought some loose connection, tried plugging all the ide cables, power cables. I have read some of the answers & removed the battery for a couple of seconds. when I boot, it says a hard disk of 6gbs was found a floppy disk was found press f1 to save. I can't get into CMOS settings even if I press F10. If I press F1, that compaq screen appears & hangs So I tried pressing F2 instead of F1. And tried to boot with a boot disk. Now I am able to boot. I am able to see the contents on my cd but on c:. No d: is available So I can't see the hard disk. I tried using Fdisk, it says "no fixed disks present" I didnot save the CMOS information. If I save it hangs. I don't know if the HDD crashed. When I switch on the pc after I put the battery back, it said 162 - System options not set 163 - Time and date not set The following configuration options are automatically updated. Disk1 : 6447Mbytes If U have unix......... Total memory installed : 294912Kbytes diskette drives CMOS Check sum invalid, default values loaded F1 : Save changes Thats Disk 1 is the hard disk size I will be really thankfull if Can somebody help me with this Thanks A Million Ramesh

Thats weird... Just out of curiosity, what model of compaq is it? i had a Compaq Presario(PII 233, 64 SDRAM) that is slightly older that what yours sounds like, and two years ago the hard drive just randomly stoped working. it was long ago, but i remember seeing "no fixed disk" when i tried fdisk. i tried everything i could think of, and finally it sat in the closet for 2 years as a on of those "to do" projets that never gets finished. i pulled it out a month ago and booted it up. Much to my surprise, it just worked. it was pretty weird seeing my drive from 2 years ago, it was like a time warp or somthing. anyway, I have no idea. it may be that there is a cable or some connection loose or some stupid thing like that. i cant explain why mine just worked(if it is the same problem any way...) Wish i could really help, Be_Lo