Hi. I just put together a computer. I installed Windows 98, then Windows ME upgrade, hardware drivers, etc., etc. It worked fine when I shut it off last night. When I powered it up again I got the message, Disk Boot Failure - Insert System Disk. The last things I did were a Scandisk and a Defragmentation. I checked to make sure all the cables were plugged in. They were. I tried changing the order of boot device. That didn't work. The BIOS wasn't detecting the harddrive. I tried booting from the WIndows 98 disk, and even the Windows ME upgrade disk. Neither worked. I then tried a floppy bootdisk to format and re-install Windows 98. I got the message Cannot Format a Network Drive. I then tried Fdisk and got the message CDR101 - Not Ready Reading Drive C. Is there anything I can do to save the drive and system already installed? Thanks in advance.

Well, if the drive isn't seen in the bios, there isn't much you can do from a higher level (ie, format, fdisk... ect) Triple check the cabling... if you can, replace the ribbon cable. Check to see if the drive is spinning up. If the drive still isn't seen, looks like either you have a IDE controller failure on the hard drive or on the motherboard. Try the hard drive on the secondary controller just to see if it is seen by the BIOS. Let me know how it goes. Feel free to email

Hate to say it, but it looks like either the drive, cable or IDE controller died.