"Anyway, I shut it down and go back about a half hour later and it shows no harddrive loaded now." Remove the power to the case and make sure the data and power cables are pushed onto the connectors all the way, that there are no gaps between the data cable and the connectors (if there are press the cable against the back of the connectors), and that the power connector is not too loose on the drive pins (common on old computers - if it is use something tiny such as a larger sewing needle to bend the arc of the metal ends on the wires so that the diameter is smaller and fits more snugly). Also examine the edges of the data cable at each connector or under the cable clamps there and look for rips that have damaged or severed wires there. If in doubt try another data cable, or buy one - they're cheap. If the data cable has no strap to pull on at a connector, pull on the center of the data cable rather than the edges to prevent possibly ripping the data cable when removing it. You could also check the drive - it may be faulty, but do the above first. check your hard drive. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/... "But if the battery is old or dead it will not detect the Hard Drive." It shouldn't matter - if the bios is set by defaults to Auto detect the hard drive, by the method Auto or LBA(in this case), it should be detected whether or not the battery is good. However if the defaults are no drive installed (unlikely for the primary on the 1st IDE), or if the method is not Auto or LBA by default, or if the drive was using User parameter settings and isn't auto detected, the hard drive would not be seen if the battery were dead or too weak. It is a good idea to remove the power to the case when you remove the mboard battery or move a jumper to clear the cmos. An ATX mboard is powered in some places all the time, and the the large capacitors in the PS will be charged up from the last time the PS was fully on and take longer to discharge if the mboard is powered - removing the power allows those capacitors and any on the mboard to discharge faster and it takes less time for the cmos settings in the bios to reset to defaults. If you do replace the battery pay attention to it's polarity - if it's a coin cell usually + is up. If the polarity is backwards, the bios will "think" the battery is dead. The more common coin cells are widely available - e.g. Walmart, some dollar stores. After you install the battery, the first time you boot you will get a "Cmos Checksum Error...." or similar message. You will either be prompted to enter the bios Setup or you will automatically go there. Enter the bios Setup, set the date and time, make sure the hard drive(s) and cd drive(s) you have connected are set to be Auto detected by the method Auto or LBA - save settings, reboot. If you have a fairly recent model scanner or printer (~1999 or later) connected to a parallel (LPTx) port, you also need to make sure it is set to EPP, EPP/ECP, or ECP mode in the bios - usually EPP is fine - ECP mode also requires you use Add Hardware in Windows 95/98/98SE to install an ECP port if it is not already there in Device Manager.

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Another thing you could check for in the bios Setup is some bioses have a setting that allows you to delay the detection of the hard drives for xx seconds while you boot. Sometimes slower hard drives are not reliably detected or not detected at all while booting on a fairly fast booting mboard, and specifying a delay will allow them to be detected every time. Try a higher setting first, work your way down to a minimum later.

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