When I start up my laptop with no disks or anything inserted into it, it will go directly in something called "PhoenixBIOS 4.0" and it does all this checking and stuff. At the end of it, it says "ERROR 0200: Failure Fixed Disk 0". it then gives me the option to hit F1 to resume or F2 to go to the BIOS setup. hittin f1 it will then say operating system not found. when i enter the windows start up disk it will say that "windows 98 has detected that the drive C does not contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition. when i try to do FDISK it will say that no fixed disks are present. Im pretty much lost now...Any help would be appreciated...

"ERROR 0200: Failure Fixed Disk 0" Means that the hard drive quit. If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2

aww man that sucks really badly...if the hard drive quit can information still be recovered from it like if i took it to CompUSA or sumwhere that does data recovery? Cuz there is sum important college project files i need from the hard drive

From what others have posted here, data recovery is very expensive. Sorry I don't have good news. Before you give up. Try putting the HD in another PC as slave. There's some small chance that it is the controller. If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2

this is why we backup important data and not to transfer devices like floppies, usb/pen drives but to storage media like tape/cdr/cdrw/another drive. Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search