Thanks Paul and all   (willpost pre- message after)
  My question to the statement  that my hdd is fried or not recognized is
then how can Scandisk and CHKDSH read it and report no errors and report its
size? I still feel that I am missing something, that I am doing something
wrong or incomplete.
   Thanks Again
         John Stoker
..............................................................................

..........................................
Thanks George or Mary
>       I tried what you recomended and finally got to this point >volume in
> drive c is MS-RAMDRIVE <  directory of C:\
>                       File not found
>                        !,,837,568 bytes free.
>  Then I Tried C:\.Format  got required parameter missing.   But the good
> news,I think is that now my boot disk works. This has become a pet project
so
> I'll keep pluggin away.    Thanks Again John Stoker
..............................................................................

...............................................
This begins to sound more like your hard disk really has fried,
become disconnected, or has, in some way, become invisible
to the system.  When you boot a computer with the Win98 boot
disk it sets up and assigns an unused drive letter to a RAM drive.
This is not a physical drive, but a use of system RAM to temporarily
store certain diagnostic and other tools (format.com is located here
when you boot with the Win98 startup disk).  The fact that the
drive letter C has been assigned tells me that a hard disk may not
have been found.  [On my computer, drive D becomes the MS-RAMDRIVE
and drive E becomes my CD-ROM (if, of course, I elected to start up
with CD-ROM support.]

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml