Hello, I hope someone can help me. I think it might be a boot record problem, but I am not sure.

To make a long story short, after doing a reboot when win98 froze (was accessing a very large network drive at the time), I was receiving the "disk i/o error" on startup. I was able to boot from my win98SE cd. I was able to access my HD and ran scandisk. During surface scanning it froze. I rebooted and received the same "disk i/o error". After booting using my win98SE install cd, I could not access my HD any longer.

I've run fdisk /mbr. Doesn't help. POST is fine. At least I think it is, I am not receive any error beeps or messages.

I've checked the bios and the HD is recognized when running "ide hdd auto detection". I ran a fdisk /status and it is semi-recognized (?) - info is (on two lines):

Disk: 1
Drv: _____ (blank)
Mbytes: 38170
Free: _____ (blank)
Usage: 100%

Disk: _____ (blank)
Drv: C:
Mbytes: 19085
Free: _____ (blank)
Usage: _____ (blank)

When I try and run just fdisk, I receive the message "error reading fixed disk". It does not allow me to access the HD at all.

My computer specs are:

1.8 gig processor
512 mb ram
40 gig hd (partitioned 19 gigs each - c & d drives)

This computer is only a week old and I just finished installing all my applications and transferring my old data a few days ago. I *really* don't want to have to do that all over again. And even if I did, fdisk isn't allowing me access to the drive.

I also can't even reinstall winSE98 because it will not recognize the HD during setup.

Please help! I'm not sure what else to do.

Thank you,

Ida

[This message has been edited by Ida (edited 12-14-2001).]