I received the message "Disk Boot Failure Insert System Disk and Press Enter" Went out and bought a new hard drive 10 gig Western Digital 5800. Installed correctly Loaded Windows 98SE everything appeared to be fine: (PIII 500 64mb ram.) After several reboots the system sometimes(25%) would recognize the hard drive but the drive would make a constant rough spinning sound, would get the message "Disk I/0 error" when it wouldn't recognize the hard drive and the message "verifing DMI pool date" and freeze. The funny thing is on the very rare occasion it does boot to windows I ran scandisk - froze up in defrag. I've tried WIN98 Startup disk but the hard drive is not accessable. Things I've done: 1.) changed boot sequence 2.) restored bios defaults 3.) replaced drive cable 4.) tried different power plug 5.) ran scandisk Any feedback would be greatly appreciated and I thank you in advance. I've read some previous messages but I am to a point where the pc will recognize the Hard Drive In boot up - but it will either freeze or not be their. Thanks Again Scott

I am having probs. very similar to yours and it's not your harddrives. I found that by jiggling the cable to the harddrive and connect point sometimes made it possible to find the harddrive and it would work fine then in an hour or less it would go down again. I think it may be the motherboard itself.As soon as I find out I'll let you know or you me.

This sounds like hard drive controler is bad. Either change mother board or try a add-on hard drive controler card to see if the problen goes away.