this is weird, came home from work one day and computer is completely locked up, keyboard and everything. so I cold start it and figure let it do scandisk and defrag should be fine. but during the boot procedure it halts in all caps says BOOT DISK FAILURE. I run the recovery cd and can get to dos prompt, but only to the d:/ prompt, where my backup files are how do I fix this problem?

could be anything. do you have a floppy in the drive? if not, do you have a startup floppy? if you have go to the a: prompt and type sys c: then remove the startup floppy and reboot. it should be okay. if not, then the harddrive is not being detected in the bios. like i said it could be anything.

Sounds like the Master Boot Record on the disk drive got corrupted. Do you have Nortons recovery software to look at the drive? Run FDISK as see if it sees the drive information. You might need to boot from a ME Recovery diskette to do this. This is often caused by a virus and the MBR has to be fixed before you can do a virus scan. It would help if you have a boot diskette with a good up to date virus scan on it available.

hello you could allso try fdisk\mbr reboot and windows will replace mbr.

/MBR will work most of the times, but in the case of a D: on the disk, if the boot sector has been erased, the /MBR command could cause his D:\ recover disk partition to go away and later be trashed by windows. Best to let him respond to what FDISK finds first in this case.