I have a four year old, Pentium III PC running Windows 98SE which recently started to refuse to boot up (no hardware or software changes were made).
The hard drive, a 40GB IDE Quantum Fireball Plus AS, is recognized by the BIOS.
There are no odd sounds coming from the drive; it seems to spin up or spin down appropriately.
The PC boots fine from a floppy or CD.
Running FDISK/status returns a “No fixed disks present message.”
The jumpers are set the original way and have never been changed.
I can unplug this hard disk and plug a Seagate 40GB IDE hard disk into the same spot on the IDE cable and the PC boots fine from that new disk, which indicates to me it is not a problem with the cable or a loose connection anywhere.
Any ideas? My backups are older than they should be, and the drive is recently out of warranty…