Hi. I'm working on an NEC Ready 9625. It was locking up alot, so I formatted the HD and was going to reinstall Win98 on it. I backed everything up on my own drive first, and then started to try the install. After doing whatever, it now will not try to boot to anything on the Hard Drive, the floppy (using a win98 startup disk), or the cdrom (w/ the win98 cd in it). If I unhook the hard drive, it'll say No Operating System Found, which is normal. But if I hook that HD back up, it posts, then goes to a sort of 2nd summary screen (showing drives, etc.) and sits there w/ a blinking cursor, just like when trying to boot to floppy/cd. I cleared cmos and went in and manually had it detect all the drives (1 HD and 2 cdrom drives...all detected perfectly fine.) The drive still shows up just fine in my computer. I have the jumper in the correct setting (and tried all sorts of combos of settings just in case) to no avail. I don't get too terribly stumped very often, but I am absolutely clueless now. Did the system board just die?? It worked yesterday just fine, and I was careful when messing with stuff, so there's likely no way I did anything to damage it. I even tried using the HD and put it in another pc and installed win98 on it then put it in the NEC, no luck. I also formatted and copied all the original files back onto the HD, cuz that usually works w/ win95/98, but the same thing. Any help is MUCH appreciated.

Hi xxx: If the HD works on another PC then try changing the ribbon cable, or maybe the plug has a bad connection. Next try a different HD in your PC to see if it will boot, it doesn't need to be a large drive if you test by installing DOS (if you have a copy). If the HD works then your old drive might have bad boot sectors that can't be read. If none of these work then you could have a bad connection between control board (older PC) & ISA or PCI slot. If you have an integrated motherboard & nothing else works the control card section could be bad, then you could try using a slot type control card (make sure you turn off MB control card in bios) if you want to spend money on your PC, no guarantee this will work, could be something else on motherboard. Good luck, Z

Thx for the reply. Yeah, I tried another HD and it does the same thing, just hangs there w/ a cursor. I'm just gonna try to find a new system board, i'm 99.99999999% sure that'll fix it. It could be some off-the-wall setting or something that I'm missing, but I'll take that chance :D