Re: Drive failure?
 

The incorrect clock is caused by the battery, replace it regardless.
Bad batteries will cause BIOS settings to change which can affect
the hard drive settings in the BIOS.

Go into BIOS and look for the hard drive size.
If nothing is there and the hard drive is physically installed, correctly,
then look on the outside of the drive, for the capacity (heads, cylinders
and sector count). If the BIOS doesn't support auto detect then put
this information in. Leave LBA turned OFF and try again.

Since you have swapped the hard drive, from later post from you, I would
suspect the problem is in the BIOS settings caused by the bad or weak
battery.

Dell has some floppy based diagnostics that can test the machine. Have
you gone to their website and downloaded them so you can run a test
on the machine?

The other possibility is a bad "on-board" IDE interface. If a known
good drive fails in place of the possible bad drive then you might
want to check this. You would need an external PCI IDE controller
and turn off the BIOS controller before you could test this.

That's my 2cents worth



"LadyTech" <nomailplease@4myprivacy.invalid> wrote in message
news:11d67rf8o808q0e@corp.supernews.com...
> Had a neighbor call me today with a problem. She's still using Win98
> (Dell computer) and all she was doing was playing Solitare - during
> the game the computer locked up and then she got a BSOD saying "write
> disk error" press any key to continue - Well, she waited for me to
> come over and when I pressed the key to continue all I got was the
> busy hour glass, the cursor and a few squares of the screen,
> everything else was black. I tried the 3 finger salute - nothing. I
> knew it was locked up anyway, so I hit the reset button. When the
> screen and the computer came back on the Dell screen came up and sat
> there for awhile and then no boot into Windows, just a dos screen
> that said "No Boot Drive" hit F1 to reboot or F2 to enter the Setup.
> Each time I tried rebooting the computer I'd get 2 beeps and then the
> "No Boot Drive". I booted with a boot disk and still the same. So I
> ran Scandisk from the boot disk and it told me there were no errors
> found on Drive C. I then ran Scandisk in dos and still no errors
> found! I then went into the BIOS and no Drive C was there. I was
> tempted to run fdisk/mbr but she didn't want me to, so I didn't do
> it. I do have another spare hard drive and want to swap drives to see
> if it actually is the hard disk. She had to get the ok from her
> husband before I did anything to it *rolls eyes*. Could this be a
> drive failure like I think it is or should I do something else?