ok heres what happened - i was booting up win98 as usual and when the windows desktop came up on screen i got an error message something along the lines of "the windows registry is damaged and windows needs to be restarted to repair the damage" so i restarted and when it booted up scandisc came up and started to scan the drive but it stopped straight away and said something like "part of the disk partition/boot sector is damaged and csan disk cannot run. so i had to power down and when i started up windows would not boot and now i have found that neither windows or my bios is recognising my C: drive. This means that i cannot run my virus scan disk to clean it if its a boot sector virus as theres no disk to scan. All that happens when i boot up is that after a while trying to boot the boot prompt comes up and i have the option of booting from a floppy it also means that when i run fdisk or fdisk/mbr from a bootable floppy it comes up with the message "no fixed disks present" if you have any idea what could be causing this i would be very grateful(could the leads connecting the drive be damaged)

BIOS has to be detecting the hard-drive or it would say something like primary master hard drive error at boot up before it even gets anywhere and it has to be detecting the hard-drive because you said it starts windows when u get the error r u trying to say u started windows off a floppy disk........ geeeeez use the bootdisk and type scanreg or regscan i think it one of those or just type format C: and reinstall windows

the bios isnt detecting the hard drive and windows certaintly isnt - hence the "no fixed disks present" message i didnt say i started windows - i said i booted to a windows startup disk and i cant "just type format c: and reinstall windows" because 1. i didnt get a proper win98 disc with my pc 2. i cant format a drive with windows if windows itself is not recognising the drive 3. i dont want to loose all the data on my hard disk does anyone have any suggestions?

Will the autodetect in BIOS not recognize the hard drive parameters? Try setting up the parameters using user type. The settings are often listed on the label of the hard drive. Check to make sure connections on hard drive are secure. After setting this up, run fdisk and use the verify option to check your partitions. Make sure you have a logical Dos partition and that it is active.

Download a diagnostic from the hard drive manufacturers web site. I would say that the drive is 'probably' toast.