John:

I am assuming you have a 1.35 GB hard drive (no other hard drives) in your
system, and that the drive select jumper is properly set as a solo (a.k.a,
master without slave) hard disk. Also, that the cabling and power
connections are correct. Further, you have gone into CMOS and auto-detected
the drive (or manually inputted the drive's cylinders, heads and sectors,
and set the mode to LBA), and set your Boot Sequence A: C:  Finally, I
assume you have backed up all the disk's data that you care to save.

Go to the website of the hard drive maker and get the Diagnostic Utility
for the drive. The utility is usually a self booting disk that provides
diagnostics and a write-zeroes-to-disk utility (a pseudo low level formatter).

Boot to the Disk Utility Disk. Zero out the drive and run a full
diagnostics on the drive. Allow the Utility to repair any bad sectors. If
the disk does not pass the testing/recertification procedure, don't use the
disk and try to RMA it. You may have an irreparable BOOT SECTOR or system
area on the disk.

Re-Boot to your Windows 98 startup disk. At the Command Prompt, run the
following command:

        FDISK  1  /PRI:1400

This will create a 1400 MB Primary DOS Partition on the first hard disk and
set it active; FAT32 is default. It is an undocumented switch for FDISK.
You will return to the Command Prompt without any confirmation message.

RE-BOOT and then run the following command:

        FORMAT  C:  /S  /U

Then SCANDISK the C: drive, with surface analysis. You can run  SYS C:  to
transfer the system files again to the hard drive (for good measure).

Set up HIMEM.SYS and OAKCDROM.SYS support in C:\CONFIG.SYS, and then
MSCDEX.EXE support in C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT.

Eject your floppy and RE-BOOT to the hard drive. Load Windows 98 by your
usual method.

Regards,

John Chin

____________________________

At 04:46 PM 11/09/2001 John Stoker wrote:
>. . . The problem occurs at this point. After pressing enter I get Error
>reading fixed disk. Then I it goes back to A prompt. Also it will not accept
>a boot disk. I have to use a 98se start up disk. When I use a "boot" disk I
>get the message Hard disk failed.I have tried replacing with the boot disk
>after using the start up disk but this gives me a list of files from the
>config.sys that are missing or corrupted.  then i get warning hma is not
>available additional low memory will be used  finally I end at file missing
>or corrupted:FDISK Type the name of the Command  Interpreter.

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