I have a WD Caviar EIDE 10Gbyte hard drive, configure as primary IDE master. The symptoms of my problem: 1. Win98 freezes while trying to boot, it just stops at the splash window and does nothing. 2. BIOS can't recognise the hard drive 3. boot floppy disk can't detect the hard drive too 4. Reconfigure as primary IDE slave, still can't boot What are the possible causes of this problem? Should I reload Win98 SE?

"BIOS can't recognise the hard drive" You're not going to get anywhere until you can overcome that particular issue. What you're saying is somewhat contradictory - if the drive isn't recognized in the BIOS, nothing at all on it will work Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

WD harddrives have a jumper setting for Master alone and Master with slave. If this is the only drive on the cable then set for Master alone. Boot to the BIOS screens and verify that you have the IDE channels all set to AUTO. As jboy has stated, you need to get the BIOS to recognise the drive. Is this drive new to this system? If the harddrive and cables, including power are connected correctly and the drive still is not showing in the POST screens then I would suggest setting the boot order in the BIOS to floppy drive first and booting to a Win98 boot disk. Then type fdisk. Choose option #4 to see how and if the drive is identified by Fdisk. If not identified that way then the drive may be dead.

Hi, Fit a new BIOS battery. Leave it out fo r30 minutes or so to clear anything held in memory, or use the motherboard jumper / BIOS key sequence to clear NVRAM Replace the IDE ribbon cables Take anti static precautions whilst working inside your computer. hth Ceri