hi, you say your drive is dead,TAKE CARE DONT TRY FORMATTING IT", sometimes a hard drive cable can become dislodged and the system bios cannot detect it. you dont say if the drive can be seen in bios so try this. boot up as normal, but when the boot screen omes up, a few words will or should say press f12 for setup, this is the bios setup, if you go into the bios setup and scroll through until you see drives, bios will give you a list of drives installed, if your main drive is not listed then its posible (just posible) that the IDE ribbon cable has come adrift from the back of your hard drive or maybe the motherboard. i wish i had a penny for all the people who have asked me to fit a new drive to find its a simple hardware problem. if on the otherhand the drive is seen in bios, but just wont boot, with a hard drive error, there could be either of these two problems (a) a virus in the boot secter (b) a corupt header file on the drive (you could try using fdisk to clear and then re-create a new partition, (b) the drive could have an serious hard error (failure), however try the above before deciding that the drive is kaput. hope this helps..
mike, March 2008
