I had recently reinstalled windows 98se and had everything working really smooth, untill the next time I had to boot up. My bios cant find any hard drives (I have two), and once I use the boot floppy, even then it says that no drives exist. I dont have a clue what to do.... I even set my boot sequence to only C:\ but if it cant auto-detect the drive how can it boot from it. The bios refuses to auto-detect... it is as if the hard drives were not connected. I am lost......

Welcome to D-A-L.

What bios is on the machine? (Award, AMI, Phoenix, IBM, etc) What version/year?

Also please post a little info about the machine. Age, laptop?, desktop?, amount of RAM, etc.

Was your boot floppy made on a working 98SE machine? (ie; is it a 98SE boot disk?)

If you need one, (98SE) you can download one here. (See * below.)

Boot the machine with the 98SE boot floppy. When you get the A:\> prompt, type in fdisk/status. Does it find any hard disks? If so, post the information.


*
The above bootdisk image file is a self extracting file and has to be executed (run) from a running Windows machine in order to create the actual startup diskette. (This image file produces the same bootdisk which 98SE creates.) This downloaded image file will format the floppy disk, write the files to the disk, then verify the file write, so it'll take a minute or three to create the bootdisk.

Ensure the floppy drive is set as the first boot device in the bios.

When you boot a machine with this boot floppy, it creates a RAMDRIVE in system memory to contain DOS system tools. Thus it will move your "normal" CDROM device/drive letter "up" one level. (If your CDROM is normally E:, it will be F: when booting with this bootdisk.) Watch for the CDROM device letter which will be assigned near the end of the floppy boot process.

longroughrider, I've created a new post for your issues. See; longroughrider - Make Slave hard disk the Master in the 98 forum.