More Hard drive problems

I don't know whats going on. After I got my IDE cables and replaced them my 40gig would read in bios but not boot up. read - http://www.techimo.com/forum/showthr...threadid=73975

I put in my 3GB hard drive (before i think i said 2gb, its a 3) and loaded windows and everything. No problems whatsoever.

My friend says he's got another working 3 gb hard drive that i could use until i got a bigger HD again. When I installed this one, I did it "page by page" "line by line". I put the static band on, mounted it, did everything like your suppose to. So now I have my 3gb on primary ide master, and my friends on primary ide slave. I booted up and the BIOS didnt read anything. Well then I just used my friend's as a master. It booted up and he stil had his stuff on there, everything worked good. So then i put my 3gb back on as master. The bios reads it ok, and when I boot up it says "Reading Boot Record from IDE-0 - OK". but after that it says "invalid system disk, replace the disk and press any key". I'm stuck.

2 Hard drives gone!???!?! Do i have a BIOS virus or something? My CPU has been getting hotter than normal latley, could the CPU/Mobo be screwing with it ? If i get another big HD, and it "frys/mess's up it too.........
Could it be my motherboard or something?

HELP!

[dunbar]

PSU?

Allied 350W (Little over 2 years old now)

Specs (No OC'ing done to anything):
-2 UV Cold Cathode Lights
-2 Lighted Fan
-SVC UV Sens. IDE Cable ATA100/133 & normal IDE cables
-PC Chips M817LMR
-AMD Athlon 1333mhz
-Memorex 48X CD-RW
-Radeon 9200

My CPU temps have been around 61*C just on AIM idleing. I don't think this could cause it but I also need to fix this.

[billniceguy]

are u setting the jumpers correctly on the hard drives?

i'm pretty sure i am but my regular 3GB always booted before, and I never chnaged the jumpers. Why would it matter now?

help? no hard drives are working. is my MB fried? im using Knoppix right now perfectly with no hard drive. All the drives I try read in the bios. But when I go to fdisk it says error reading fixed disk. When i go directly to the windows98 setup it either says it needs (some small size, i know i have this) space to continue, or it needs a valid fat32 partition (when i fdisk, it says error reading/writing fixed hard drve).

????

Your MB seems OK if you can run Knoppix. So does your RAM/CPU.

I suspect a corrupt mbr.

Boot from a 98SE disk and at the command prompt type: fdisk /mbr for the C drive. This will refresh the corrupt mbr.

hmmmm did that and i guess it did something, didn't tell me anything though. when i go into fdisk it says i have a extended partition and when i delete it it says it has logical. But when i delete logical, it says none exist......hmmm i tried making a primary dos and its going realllllly slow verying the drive integrity, ill post back after its done.

[DoctorReno]

Hello again.
I think you have a jumper issue. According to what you are saying you are moving yours and your friends HD's back and forth but you don't mention that you change the jumpers nor do you mention that you go into the BIOS setup and let the BIOS detecct the drives after you have moved them.
I don't want to be redundant but you need to configure each drive by jumpering them according the the jumper schematic that should be printed on the drive somewhere and then connecting the drive to the correct connector on the IDE cable.
Next, go into the BIOS setup and set the Primary IDE master and slave to auto detect.
You should be Ok then. I do not believe that you have fried anything this time since you are using the grounding strap.

Oh, and finally what is the boot sequence you have set in your BIOS?

Well, now i am only using 1 hard drive, and the jumper is set correctly (i will double check though just to make absoulte sure). Everytime i changed something, even if i just reconnected a cable, i autodetected (f3) hard drives. My boot seqence right now is floppy (win98 bootdisk), cd-rom (win98 setup disk), ide-0 (hd).

shahani: I did the fdisk /mbr and went into fdisk, my checking drive intergrity was erratic starting over and getting faster/slower etc. I made a primary dos partition and now when i go to c: it says somthing like failed reading media. Right now i went to d: (a ramdisk i guess, the diagnostic tools loaded to it. and am formatting c:, every so often i see the % but im mostly seeing "Try to recover allocation unit (numbers here)"

I'm getting somewhere guys, this is awesome. thanks in advance.

edit: btw, doctor reno, you've been helping me since the start. i really appreciate it. sorry for some of my replies that may have seemed smartalic. thanks to everybody else helping me also