Eric,

A couple of things to try; First you need to boot off of a clean disk and
run a anti-virus software program, I use Norton for this check.  I know you
said you are reformatting the hard drive but if you have a boot sector
virus that will not be eliminated by reformatting.  If this turns out clean
there are a couple of other checks that can be done.  One is in your device
manager is there a PCI Bridge device showing up with a conflict?  If so go
to WWW.WINDRIVERS.COM there are some drivers that can be downloaded from
there to fix this problem, this also will repair your PCI IDE Controllers
and several other devices on your computer that may never even have shown
up.  One more thing you can do from a DOS Prompt type FDISK /mbr at least
twice you said you have two hard drives, this fix should be one of the last
you try.  If none of these work for you write back and I will research this
a little more for you.

At 04:09 PM 3/16/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Hello-
>        I have encountered a very frustrating problem that is occuring on my
>computer.  Just so I don't leave anything out I will give you what our
>system is:  Pentium 166MMX, 32 Meg RAM, 24x BTC CD Rom, 16 bit OPTI sound
>card, 850 meg harddrive(primary), and 250 meg hardrive(slave), we are
>running Win95b.
>        I first found this problem when I tried to install a Win95 game
and it
>wasn't working properly, I went to the technical help and they told me to
>do the following.  Right click on My Computer --> Properties -->
>Performance.  Under that tab is where we found our error.  Instead of being
>set up for optimal performance, our system had several errors.  Down where
>it usually says "Your system is configured for optimual performance," we
>had these errors.  1.  Compatibility mode paging reduces overall system
>performance.  2.  Drive c: (850 meg) using MS-DOS compatibility mode file
>system.  3.  Drive d: (250 meg) using MS-DOS compatibility mode file
>system. 4. Drive e: (cd rom) using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system.
>I'm not sure if our Drive A: was also listed because we have had this
>problem before.(more about that later)  Then I went over and clicked on the
>Device Manager Tab.  I went down to were it says Hard Disk Controllers and
>double-clicked on it.  Doing that listed these three things.  1.  Primary
>IDE controller (single fifo) NOTE: This has a circled exclamation point in
>front of it 2. Secondary IDE controller (single fifo) NOTE: also has an
>exclamation point in front of it.  3. Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller
>(this device has no exclamation point next to it)  When I clicked
>Properties on one of the devices with an exclamation point next to it I got
>this message:  This device is not present, not working properly, or does
>not have all the drivers installed.  See your hardware documentation. (Code
>10).

Mike
PC Tech