Recovered computer using recovery disk (chose Format & Recover option). When formating hard disk, it hanged at 52%. Restart the computer to choose the option i did earlier. After formatting, it said "unable to intialize the hard disk" Boot computer, it said "boot disk failure" Reboot and placed Win98 startupdisk.Cannot format drive C: Do partition on the disk (FDISK) but "no fixed disk present" (unable to choose from the four option avaliable) Typed Fdisk/mbr, it said " the master boot record has not been updated yet" Please help to solve my doubts: 1)Is the hardisk damaged or corrupted? 2)Can the hard disk be revived? 3)Can suggest ideas or ways to repair my hard disk?

Who is the disk manufacture, and what model and size is it? Go to the drive manufacturer's web site and down load their disk analysis tool for that model of drive, make their boot diskette and use it to boot the system and see if their program can find the disk drive. Sometimes their program can tell what is wrong with the drive and in some cases fix it by doing a manufacturer's level format of the drive.

"no fixed disk present" Without that you're dead in the water. You may want to reboot and go into the BIOS. If it isn't recognized there then you have a hardware problem. It can be interface problems cable problems drive problems (most likely)

JackG, I have a maxtor 40G hard disk and also had downloaded their disk analysis tool but it showed "failed" for certain parts of its analysis Rayman, May I know how to get into BIOS! How certainly can you tell whether the hard disk is spoilt or corrupted?

Usually there is something on the screen just after POST that says press F1, F10, Del, Esc, something like that. When you go into bios you should find a screen of advanced features or integrated peripherals that deal with the Hard disk "C:". if it has no information then you'll never get access to it. some BIOS allow you to choose from a list of types of drives but newer boards auto detect and set them during POST. If you mount that drive as a slave in another computer and it is recognized in that BIOS then the drives probably OK. otherwise it's toast. If it does show up i'd try to repartition and format it there. Then put it back where it was and check bios again. if it's there then do the recovery disk thing.