1st issue - PC won't do more than fire power supply cooling fan. No display, keyboard, etc. Checked for loose connections. rapped HD a bit..... Still nothing. As a clue, had a surge which knocked out pc a couple months ago. Subsequent usage that day resulted in pc shutting down on its own about 6 times. never since.. Then put master HD from that pc into an older one. Booted pc, and got messages regarding safe BIOs, needing Win 98 CD which was not at home, but continued the process anyway. The system booted, but hardware did not match, so did a search, and now I am getting a message during scan of C drive that the FAT is damaged. I can see the contents of the HD by booting from a floppy. So two issues. 1st is original problem with the booting of the newer pc. The second is whether or not I have damaged my primary HD. thanks.

I suspect you fried the MoBo during the power surge and that's why you don't see anything at power up. You probably damaged the drive as well. Not a pretty thought. In all likelihood there's not much worth salvaging .. or it will be very costly to try. Don

I can see the mobo being damaged by the pwr surge, but I'd bet that the HD is salvagable. The information on it may be scrambled, but if you can see the info by booting from a floppy, you should be able to save it. Now, the mobo...probably gonna need replacing. Good luck.

Hey Don, Yeah, probably. Funny thing is it has taken a couple months to hit this point. Though, booting has been inconsistent, often halting during the process, and forcing me to warm boot, and go through a drive scan. Also, while the parallel port communicates with the scanner, it won't with the printer. So might be time to do the upgrade. All the data is accessible on the HD, so I may just end up slaving it, and copying from it what I need. I figure I caused the FAT problem last night by attempting to boot using that HD on my older FAT16 unit, now that I think of it.

Thanks Sterling.

You're maybe right. I assumed you booted it on a Win95 machine?? It won't read FAT32 drives .. even worse, don't attempt to write to a FAT32 drive with Win95. You might get lucky slaving it to another Win98 box with a disk with a spare partition. Might be able to get a lot of stuff back that way. The problem sometimes is that although you can see files on a damaged drive with DIR, when you attempt to copy the file(s) or folders with XCOPY or XXCOPY, you'll get read errors. In that case, you've got more than you bargained for. I've seen power surges really do a number on a spinning drive while it's writing to it. Good luck. Don

The older machine is also 98, but when I set it up, did so as FAT16. So, I am not sure what I might do. maybe slave that drive, and try copying files to a zip drive. Or, is there any reliable software that might fix the FAT?