Right, here's one for the very best of ya.
My hard disk cannot be read. It is recognised by the BIOS, but upon boot I get "missing operating system". I can boot from a floppy (Windows ME Startup disk) but upon trying to read from drive C: I get "invalid media descriptor" or something similar.
Now, before anyone says "run FDISK and re-partition, then re-format and re-install", this is not an option. I do not want to lose the data, as I have 2GB of MP3s, and some important data from my college work. PLEASE can someone help.....

Oh yeah, the disk was a 20GB FAT32 disk with just one primary dos partition. If I run FDISK now and choose "display partition information" it says there is a partition of 51% of the disk of an "unknown type".

Umm.. sounds like you are experiencing every Techies nightmare... a crashed hard drive. If you can... Try taking the drive to a computer shop and see if they can salvage the information and put it on a new drive. If the information is "sensitive in nature" you can purchase another hard drive, make it the master, your format and install of Windows (whatever flavor). Then make the old drive the slave, and then see if you can access the drive.

HopeThisHelps,

-me-

See you posted again... Well you can try one other thing and that you can check into some utilities... but I think you may be hosed...
check out the link above for an article that I found that describes "invalid media descriptor"

-me-

I had a problem with my computer not recognizing my hard drive, try looking in your cmos and switching the boot sequence, there are other features in there that you also might want to try. If it just all of a suddent just crashed, it might be a crapped out hard drive, or if you were installing something or anything like that, then probably you just changed something and dont know it.

try first to salvage your data before you do anything or before you use any utilities...
take out your hard drive bring and jump it as a slave and install it on another computer that has a CD burner (you need to finde a computer that can handle big partition) then try to acces your HD from there and burn your MP3 on a CDR... after you did that then reformat and check for any bad sectors if the problems continue then let your HD to be replaced within waranty
if you cant get your data of the hard drive then decide if it is worth to pay some data recovery service...
Regards Miro

if you can get a copy of spinrite 5.0
it does a good job of recovering a crashed hd
if you search for spinrite+appz using google
i found it available for download.
you just put it on a bootdisk and at the a:
type spinrite, and set it for level 5

I had a big problem with my computer once and I have two solutions for you:
1. Take your hard disk from your computer and connect it to another one with antivirus and a CD-R device. After connecting it, scan your hard disk from any virus, and then copy your files to some cds. Then reformat your HD.
2. Install a second HD to your computer, and re-install your operating system to this new HD. All your files will continue to be in your old HD.
But if the damage is big, you have probably lose all your data.
Good luck.
If this helped you, send me an e-mail back. Thanks.rcofreces@noos.fr