My hard drive is a 15GB Quantum Fireball. A few days ago i was trying to fix my hard drive led. My hard drive led wouldn't turn on unless my primary CD-ROM led turned on. I would never know when my hard drive was busy. So i took action and started changing jumper settings untill the hard drive led would work. It worked once or twice. Then it wouldnt work again. After a while from trying to get the hard drive led to work normally again. The hard drive was detected as a 10GB hard drive instead of a 15GB hard drive and it gave me an error on startup after the bios screen saying Unable to access hard drive. No operating system found on any devices. It did this for a few times then it went back to normal and i continued trying to get the hard drive led to work. Then the hard drive got detected as a 10GB hard drive again the same errors would come up on boot up. Please help i have a feeling that i f---ed up my hard drive by turning it off the unproper way while trying to get my hard drive led to work normally again. I heard the boot record might have gotten messed up or the partitions may have gotten messed up too. Any help would greatly be appreciated, Thanx

You could fire it of with a 3.5" 98 bootdisk and start the computer up with CDROM support and then at the A:> prompt type the following: sys C: [enter] wait for the system files transfered message and reboot. You may also need to fix the MBR. To do this. Start the machine up with the 98 bootdisk and start up with CDROM support and then at the A:> prompt type the following: fdisk /mbr [enter] Then reboot with the floppy drive removed from the machine and it should boot from the HDD, and you should be back up and running. The jumper(s) on your HDD should be set to master. If the CDROM is the slave device on the same cable as the HDD then it needs to set to slave. On some HDD's you may have to set it as master with a slave device, otherwise it won't work properly. If the HDD is on the cable all by itself, then just set it as master and if the CDROM drive is on a cable all by itself then set it to master as well. When you boot up the machine it should detect your drives as follows: Primary Master (the name of your HDD) Primary Slave (the name of your CDROM) Secondary master (none) Secondary slave (none) The sbove configuration is how it would appear if both drives were on the same IDE cable. If they are on different cables then it would appear like this: Primary Master (the name of your HDD) Primary slave (none) Secondary Master (the name of your CDROM) Secondary slave (none) About the HDD LED not working. Try reverseing the HDD LED lead that plugs into the motherboard at the front. It is grouped with other plugs like the reset switch, the power LED, the power button, system speaker, etc. You get the picture. Use a flashlight to read the writing on the end of the connectors. This way you will be sure you have the right one. It also may be advisable to revisit your motherboard manual before attempting this. If you don't have one. Do a Google search for it and download it, print it out and read it. Good Luck.

Very good, Dave02. You hit about everything I was thinking while reading the original post. I think I would make sure that the hdd and the cd were on separate channels. This might even take care of the led problem, if it isn't plugged in backwards. That usually doesn't work at all. And the two drives should not be on the same channel, anyway. It slows everything down too much. HTH :)

I appreciate the post's. But what if the start up disk does not work. If i put in the start up disk and turn on the computer it acts like if it's gonna read the floppy disk and right when you think the start up menu is going to appear instead it stays on the black background screen with the blinking cursur on the top left hand corner of the screen. Also i tryed reseting my cmos settings thru jumper settings on my mother board. Now i get an error saying that system options have not been set. I tryed getting into bios and it wont go into bios.

OK, i got rid of the system options not set error but i still cant boot up using my windows 98 startup floppy disk.

Resulted that the IDE cable being used to hook up the hard drives were bad. Thanx for the replies i appreciated it.