I received a Primary HD failure after shutting down my computer. Prior to this I had removed the drivers for my modem and then went to Add Hardware and installed the drivers again. As soon as I had hit Shutdown, I received an error message. I was able to boot the system with system disk. Ever heard of this problem before?

I have had primary hard drive failures before. It is probaly a real problem. I would trying to fdisk and reformatting. You will loose everything when you do this. I have also successfully f-disked and formatted then it would not install the o/s reliabily. it would appear to install and then it would not boot. Some hard drives have warantees on them. They usually have a date of manufacture on them. contact the compuay who manufactured it and inquire. Western Digital has a 3 year warantee from the date of manufacture. The problem probably has nothing to do with the installation of drivers. Try booting with a DOS disk and doing a scandisk. Dos doesn't use any drivers unless they are loaded in the autoexec.bat or config.sys files. This way you are independent of Windows and anything you have changed there will not matter.

Go to the Hard Drive manufacturers site & download the free utility that most have , to help you get your HD the way you want . Hit the pause button during Boot up , you can then read the Make & Model of your HD . Maxtor's is called MaxBlast , Seagate's is DiscWizard , Quantum's is DiskManager , IBM have a selection , Fujitsu's is OnTrack DiskGo , Western Digital's is Data lifeguard Tools . Here are those brand sites , http://www.maxtor.com/products/DiamondMax/software/maxblast/index.html http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz_utilities.html http://service.quantum.com/softsource/disk_docs/dm2000.htm http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm http://www.fcpa.com/cgi-bin/goFrames.cgi/support/su_drivers.html http://www.wdc.com/service/ftp/drives.html#dlgtools Also this utility may also help . http://www.geocities.com/prestonlewis/ Data Recovery.Zip ( Freeware ) Repairs hard drive damage from virus, fdisk problems, formatting mistakes, power failures and application errors. For FAT16 or FAT32.

http://www.sover.net/~whoi/WinUtils2.html Media Test A program which will test your hard drive. It does a non-destructive surface scan to find out if you have physical or logical problems with your hard drive. This allows you to determine the best means of recovery. You will also know where the damage is on the drive. The program gives you a choice to test the drive through the BIOS or directly through the controller by using the mt/d command (media test direct). Media Test will allow you test the contoller as well. The program gives you that option so you can test drives larger than 8.4 gigs or if the BIOS does not even recognize the drive is there. This program provides a quick effective method of determining the status of your drive. Works with all drives: IDE, SCSI. Media Test also tests floppies,zip drives,virtually any type of media. Single DOS disk. Quick, effective drive evaluation tool.

The HD is not the problem. After I was able to get the HD to boot with the Windows Systems disk. I have shut the thing down and rebooted 20 times now and still no problem. Scan disk found no errors.