I was having some trouble running an annual defrag. So, as recommended, I
started a through scandisk.  It was only a 4gig HD yet this took several
hours longer than usual as it encountered several critical errors. Scandisk
was able to fix them all and we were back up. However I thought I would run
it again since it had "fixed them all" it shouldn't take long.
 This time at around 1% complete scandisk encountered an error while reading
the fat on C: drive and this error prevented scandisk from fixing the drive.
At this time I shut down to DOS and ran "chkdsk.exe", tried "scandisk /
all", and also "scandisk / all /surface" Nothing was helping so I shut down
and restarted with a boot disc. Upon completion of checking the memory etc..
I had a "primary master hard disk fail" "F1 to cont. Del to set up". I
checked the IDE hard disk detection, all parameters were as they should be.
So I hit F1,
 Now "Windows 98 has detected that C: dose not contain a valid FAT or FAT32
partition. Now at this point I should run FDISK but this was no help. It is
as if the hard drive doesn't exist, FDISK doesn't start. I couldn't reformat
if I wanted to ( and I don't ) I need some of the files on this drive. Is
there some way I've over looked of finding and reading this drive or has my
little HD up and died with out warning.

thanks for helping
Howard Marschner

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