harddrive nightmare

[flynnwallace]

I have a serious problem. I have a new harddrive but it wont load any OS I put on it. Win98, linux, msdos, nothing. When it does load the OS the harddrive will not boot. I have set the partitions to bootable and the motherboard bios is set to boot the hd also so I have no idea what to do. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Hard drive...
IBM deskstar 20.5 gig

Flynn

[bdg1983]

Try to start from scratch.

Use a dos/win bootdisk, use fdisk to delete ALL the partitions including any non-dos partitions, reboot and issue the command 'fdisk /mbr', reboot again with the same bootdisk and then create 1 primary partition (whatever size you want for W98), reboot again and then format the new primary partition. Reboot and install Win98.

I don't know what else to suggest. At least wipeing everything clean may help.

BIOS setting are correct? Using LBA? Bios anti-virus turned off as that may be preventing the boot record from being written to disk.

[Saptech]

Try going to the hard drive manufacturer and read documentation for the drive and check for the drive installation software, also.

[flynnwallace]

Thanks for the advice but I've tried everything you've listed about 20 times. I am currently just sending the harddrive back and getting a replacement. Been working on this thing for 4 days now with no luck. I even let two A+ techs I know work with it and they had no luck either

Flynn