hello, last night, out of knowhere, my Windows ME(changing soon) PC locked up on me, so I cold Rebooted it. After going through the BIOS loading, instead of booting up, I get a message along the lines of, "Hard disk failure, strike F1 to continue, F2 for setup". Ok... so I reboot it and go into the BIOS. I see that the BIOS has not detected my C: drive or my cd-rom drive. I proceed to make a win ME startup disk and pop that in there. It boots up, loads a cd-rom driver and the other files.. I attempt to log onto the C: drive. I get on.. ok.. this is a good thing. I then type this at the a: "sys c:" hoping that the HD is missing the system files. I reboot and the HD boots up no problem. Its recognized in the BIOS and everything. I get some good sleep. The next morning, I try it again, and now i get this message, "Primary Hard Disk Drive 0 Failure" Hmm.. i'm assuming the HD is dead..I was hoping I would be able to salvage some stuff off of it, but oh well. You guys think i need a new one? or would reformatting it and setting up win 2000 or XP work? The BIOS is recognizing it as well as the CD-ROM now(not like before). Any help or steps I have not tried yet would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

sounds like the cmos battery is dead and needs replacing.

hmm.. you think so? The time and date are still the same though.. wouldnt those be the first to get reset? I'm not sure.. it never happened to me before. (the battery's death)

If you are losing both your cd rom and your hard drive... and they are on the same IDE chain... I would try replacing the IDE cable first.