Hi there guys and gals, here is my conundrum. I have a 6 year-old Dell Dimension desktop that still runs Windows 98SE. It's older and a bit more sluggish than it once was, but that comes with age I suppose. The system worked fine up until five days ago when the blue screen of death came upon me. Much to my chagrin, it wasn't the usual message, but rather a "Disk Write Error" in which it claimed it was unable to write to drive C:\ and froze up my entire system. Upon trying to reboot, I received a prompt that read "Invalid boot disk" (or something to that effect) and asked for a bootup floppy in the A:\ drive. I had created a Win98 emergency startup disk some time ago, which helped me once in the past, but it didn't work.

In the days since then, I *have* managed to get the system restarted properly long enough to back up all of my valuable data on a Pexagon 60GB Store-it external hard drive. However, the problem is still occurring and the PC is essentially unusable in its current state. Now I admit, I am curious to find out what the problem is and would be eager for a fix, but I have decided to buy a new computer anyway because, well ... it's been six years and I'd rather buy a new one anyway rather than upgrading this one. That said, it may be a few weeks before I purchase one and I would like to be able to use this one in the meantime (w/o wiping it clean, if possible). My antivirus has been disabled by all this and the one spyware scan I was able to run yesterday turned up nothing. Does anyone have any solutions for me?

Jason

It does sound like a failing hard drive.

Do you know the manufacturer of your hard drive?

You will find the major brand diagnostics listed here:

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

With a few others listed here:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/


This scan should ID the drive if you do not know the manufacturer:

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

WDC is Western Digital; ST is Seagate; most of the others are plainly named. Otherwise a Google search of the entry line should point out the manufacturer.

Thanks for those links. Unfortunately, I cannot get into Windows at all now (though the rare occasion I do, it freezes up instantly). I figured as much that the hard drive was shot.

You could load those diagnostics on another computer and create the floppy.

They create boot floppies in order to boot the affected computer.

I actually boot together a boot floppy using my office PC (straight from bootdisk.com) and it didn't work, if you can believe it. What normally happens is I will get home late tonight, so an attempt to turn on the PC has not been made for at least 24 hours. It will probably load when I go home, but once it freezes and I force a shutdown and reboot, thats when I get the DOS prompt screen saying "Invalid boot drive", then giving me an A:\ prompt for a boot floppy. Problem is, the boot disk never works.