Any Idea's Please

You might have to update your BIOS and make sure that your IDE connections and jumpers are set correctly (Master/Slave). Set everything on your HD to Auto in BIOS and save the settings. Reboot.

I think your boot problem is coincidental unless your W98 boot disk started formatting or altering your hard drive.

When BIOS does not recognize a hard drive, it is a hardware issue.
When you cannot boot into Windows, it may be a corrupt file issue.

How / why did you run fdisk /mbr on an XP system?

NONE of the tools you are used to using to correct boot problems on a FAT32 system (such as fdisk) will do you any good on a NTFS system.

Even when formatted as a FAT32 volume, XP sets up the boot sector much differently. You need to be very cautious and conscientious about what you do to the boot sector.

Anyhow, I suspect one of a couple of hardware problems.

Start by removing and reseating your IDE and power cables to the hard drive and motherboard.

If your system is over 3 years old, change the CMOS backup battery.

Make sure that you know what your BIOS settings need to be, and clear the CMOS.

IDE cables can go bad, so try a new IDE cable if the above does not help.

Worst case, it is possible that the controller board on the hard drive is starting to fail.
Back up ALL critical files the next time you get the system to recognize and boot off of the hard drive.

Chas

i agree: coincidence. i would put in a new battery but i bet your drive is bad. you will probably need a new controller with a new drive so you will eliminate drive cable and controllers as problems with the new stuff...
i think you did maybe the definitive test with 'i notice my bios wasn't recognising my drive'
i think the item with highest probablility of failure (i can't say it either) is the drive
if you said that bios was coming up showing 'none' then it found the drive until the next time you peeked in there i would say it was your battery. but the drive should be detected even with bad battery. you might have a drive that needs time to spin up or something. bios update and new mboard drivers are never a bad idea imho either while you are in fixing this..

Just a thought...consider doing a thorough virus scan on your hard drive and the floppies you use. However unlikely, it certainly wouldn't hurt to make sure that a virus isn't your culprit.

as u are aware pc,s can have many potential fixes,if u have xp on disk try boothing with it, it will go through a startup procedure u need to get to R which is recovery console,its a blue screen with some options press R, when the screen goes black choose number 1 which should be your hard disk then type chkdsk

It's probably a hardware issue.
What error messages did you get?

possibe solutions: 1.Connect your cables properly, from your Hdisk, floppy, and CD Drives and your mobo. 2.Be Sure that your first boot device is your boot hdisk. 3. Auto Detect your Hdisk in BIOS. If You have a spare Hdisk try if your BIOS can detect it to determine if your boot HDisk is physically damaged or not. 4. If you don't have very important data on it you might as well run fdisk and reformat it though it should be the last recourse.