On 25/02 at 11:55:36 Hrs. Keith wrote
"There simply is no power to the hard drive.
### there are quite a lot of things you can do, but what I would do would be
to beg, borrow, steal or even buy another (second hand) computer - at least
Pentium II / W98 or better and put your OS hard drive directly on to it in
the place of the existing HD. Chances are it will recognise and read it.
You can then breathe again - hook your second HD on as well and hopefully
you'll be able to see all your company stuff.

Another option would be to hook the HD which contains all or most of your
company stuff on as slave behind the HD on the box you have begged or
borrowed.

Once you have seen all your valuable files intact we can probably start
helping you find out what went wrong with the Presario F"

I wish to share my experience for whatever it is worth.

I had a somewhat similar problem and took Dean kukral's very encouraging and detailed post{if you are interested in details pl ref. to january pc build archives item no 94(reply to subject "win 98se problem")} and proceeded and transferred all my data programs etc. succesfully and did fdisk, re-partition,
format, loaded win 98 se and booted up my problem hdd.

however i assumed the reverse will work and connected my working dell hdd as slave(with correct jumper setting) and booted up my newly booted home built pc which had a very different hardware set up(new asus mobo, celeron D 2.4 gig processor compared to intel chipset of dell with p3 667 mhz).

it booted ok and showed an additional drive letter but i just could not access any data, programs from my slave dell hdd no matter how much i tried.

so i disconnected the dell hdd, put it in the dell pc after chan
ging the jumper to master and lo the dell will not boot and i found that the whole win 98 se
o/s was corrupted.after a very long and arduous process and with the help of pc tech boot disk and dos command (setup /d) i was able to load win 98se under a folder "win^dows" and booted up ok but still have some problems which i intend to post to this forum.

so my opinion is that if there is a drastic difference in the hardware to which the defective/non functioning hdd is connected and that of the "borrowed, stolen, or given as alms, or purchased" comp. hardware, things may not work.

this of course is my personal experience with win 98se but the one referred in
post with subject "desperate" is win xp about which i do not know anything and it may work . very weird things do happen to comps.

sorry for the long post and all of you have a very nice day.
venkat viswanathan
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