Missed the 98 comment along the way, was a bit tired this morning :-/

Up till that bit it sounded like he was trying to mount an unknown File System.

Now I'm thinking, if his BIOS is not detecting the drive, that another PC using 98 could see correctly.... is his BIOS up to date? and what size is the Disk?

I set those to auto, exit and saved. When it rebooted I think I got a new message: "detecting HDD primary master Press F4 to skip" after a few seconds it say's none. Then to boot disk failure. I don't remember seeing this before, but not 100% sure.

OK, so the BIOS won't play ball and auto-detect the hard disk. Looks like we'll have to fix it the manual way then

Go back into the BIOS to the screen where it listed the hard drive, change the Type from 'Auto' to 'User'.

Move across to the Cylinders column (you normally do this by pressing the right cursor key) and type in the value for the number of cylinders that you noted down when you looked at the label on the hard disk.

Move across to the Heads column and enter the value.

Move across to the Sectors column and enter the value.

Note that, if nothing comes out on the screen when you type in the numbers, you probably just need to press the NUM LOCK key on your keyboard.

Leave the Mode set to 'Auto'.

In the size column, does it display the right size for the hard disk (in megabytes), e.g. 20480 ? If not, change the Mode to 'LBA' and check the Size again. If it's still wrong, cycle through the different Mode values until the Size is correct.

Exit the BIOS, saving the changes. The system will reboot. All sorted?

Sorry it took so long to get back to you. Still the same thing. ARRGH.

Sorry, I've lost track of what this problem was all about. When you say it's "still the same thing", do you mean ""detecting HDD primary master Press F4 to skip" after a few seconds it say's none. Then to boot disk failure", which is what you last told us on 31st August?

Did you follow those instructions regarding the BIOS OK and get the hard drive settings typed in under the 'User' setting?