on my laptop a couple of weeks ago, i couldnt boot from xp anymore i tried system restore disk over and over again, i even tried fdisk and after trying so many things, now when i try fdisk i get a message no fixed disk, so i said ok maybe i have a bad hard drive. Now the same thing is happening on my desktop, same problem no fixed disk, could there be virus that does this, i get to the a:\fdisk and then it gives me the no fix disk message, what could be wrong and on both machines? Could it be a virus, oh another thing on my desktop the first time that i tried to boot from a startup disk (98 desktop), it said that config.sys had several lines that were either corrupted or missing ex: aspi4doc.sys, aspi8u2.sys, aspicd.sys and ramdrive.sys. i rememver my laptop had given me a message about aspi something, i even have norton on both with a router/firewall.

Did you use the same boot floppy on both computers ? If the floppy was already infected, or if it was not write-protected, it may have spread the virus around. Go to www.bootdisk.com and download a new boot disk image file for your version of Windows. Make sure you use a new, virus free floppy, and after you extract the boot files to the floppy...write protect it. That means to open the little window in the bottom corner of the disk, so that you can see through the square hole. Then try booting with it, and going into the BIOS setup, and see if you can get your hard drive auto detected and recognised. If you can succesfully get the hard drive detected, you may be able to renew the Master Boot Record At A:\ prompt, type FDISK /MBR

no i didnt use the same floppy. and on my desktop since i have 4 removable drives, i just used another drive and it worked ok, will fdisk /mbr work on that affected hard drive.

FDISK /MBR is worth a try...but you can't go anywhere till you get the affected hard drive detected in BIOS. No command will work on a disk that doesn't exist. If it cannot be detected in BIOS, then the drive could be defective, and all this trouble similar to the laptop, could be just coincidence.