looking through the devices in my thinkpad-saw a hardware conflict between the PCI master controller and the Std HDD controller-since there were 2 HDD controllers I thought that one of them might be causing the conflict-so I disabled it and rebooted. Now no HDDs are seen by the system.
The CMOS/BIOS support on this system is high level so you dont get any detailed options-but the HDD is not shown here (HDD icon is shaded out) also no option to restore the HDD. I'm trying to find out what windows did when I disabled the device. Would it be the config.sys device= ??? or the boot track on the HDD or the BIOS ?

Any ideas?

Oh dear, Windows doesn't work too well without a hard disk! All is not lost though. You've only disabled the HDD controller in Windows, not in the BIOS - the BIOS does still know that it's there, even if you can't see the option.

What you can probably do now to resolve the issue is to boot into Safe Mode. Do you know how to do that? If not, please let us know what version of Windows you are running.

Let us know how you get on

It's 98se-Don't know how to boot into safe from DOS - please write DJ Thanks

Back in business- thanks for the tip DJ

Glad we could help

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

This thread has been Resolved and has been locked to prevent other users hijacking the thread and to help others know which threads have been Resolved and which are still being worked on.

If you started this thread and the problem returns or the case has not been properly Resolved, please send a Private Message to an Administrator or a Moderator of this forum to have the thread opened again. If you have a different problem, please start a new thread.

Re-opened by administrator at thread originator's request:

Your advice to boot into safe mode worked on both 600e computers- then I reenabled the master controllers One still works fine, The other has reverted to it's previous symptoms and won't boot into the safe mode-I've reinserted the drive several times

DJ-Got the other one working again-You know I wish there were more basic tutorials- like on the 600E CMOS to give a detailed description of the various options and what they do- In this last case I had inadvertently deactivated the initialize block.
My own knowledge is deep in some areas and very shallow in others-a flow diagram showing the actual boot sequence would be very helpful to many in diagnosing start-up problems.

Thanks again for your help and patience