First off let me say that I have had numerous problems this summer with computers (mostly old ones) and I am wondering if my home electical system has had something to do with it. We have had a lousy summer with rainy and stormy weather but I have tried to be careful unplugging the PCs. This problem is with my sons computer which had been on and and possibly a power disruption turned it off. Well now it will not boot. At first it said there was a missing or corrupt himem. I swapped a memory with another and did not get this error again. In bios I have the hdd set for auto and the time and date setting are correct. When booting (and I have done this several times) it hangs for a bit at the detecting primary hdd. Then it says Primary HDD Error and to press F1 for setup. It then asks for the bootdisk. When I boot with the EXACT boot disk for this system, I get the Win98 has detected that drive c does not contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition. I have run scandisk (it went very fast) and said that there were no errors. I did NOT do anything with FDISK as I have not had the best of luck with computers. Please help me as he will be leaving in a few days. This system had been running fine and maybe a possible power disruption caused this. Thank You Linda

Hi Linda, Yes, could have been caused by power outage. First you need to decide if there's anything on the drive which you cannot afford to lose. If whatever's on it is expendable, try this. See if the BIOS is detecting it correctly. If so, boot on a w98 startup floppy and run: fdisk /mbr Reboot. If it's no better, boot on the floppy again and: sys c: Reboot. Let us know. M2 Mechanix2Go@Golden-Triangle.com

Hi, The bios recognized the HDD and I did the FDISK/MBR but after it went thru some stuff. it said NO FIXED DISK. I rebooted then at the A prompt I ran sys c: and it said invalid. Then roboot and back to my no valid fat page. Any other suggestions now? Thanks Linda

If the hdd is recognized properly in cmos (bios), then repair utilities should find the drive. Boot with a 98 boot disk and type in; fdisk/status Report back what this finds. It should find all physical disks, the drive letters assigned to any partitions, and the size of the partitions. If fdisk finds the drive OK, then run scandisk on the drive. Failing this, download the hdd manufacturers diagnostic utility from their site and run that. These utilities will find the drive even if the bios doesn't.