I was pursuaded to upgrade my safe comfortable Win98 Pentium 200 with 13Gb HDD and 64Mb of RAM to a monster with 300Gb HDD Pentium 4 3.2GHz and 2GB of RAM and Win XP Pro. I even understood the old system to sort most probs.

Anyway a friend (expert?) of a friend built it for me and its been OK for about 3 mths. Yesterday when booting up the system went up to the IDE scan and then nothing on the screen. He has had a look at it and thinks for whatever reason the HD is blank. It is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 (ST 3300831AS). We have replaced the lead (a serial ATA type or something). However it is finding and correctly naming the drive in when you access Setup?? He installed an IDE HDD in it on different motherboard slots (excuse if I confuse terms) and it booted OK. However it also won't boot from a floppy or the Win XP CD even set as primary boot. I downloaded the Seatools utility floppy from the site and still won't boot. My friend says it won't because it still needs to read off the HD? I remember I am sure that Win95 and 98 would boot off a floppy alone so that you could at least search the drives for files. So I think it may be something else?? Maybe the ATA slots on the Motherboard...we have tried both.

Holding the HDD I can feel a smooth wind up but as it goes through the first splash screen before IDE scan you feel some slight pulses. Similarly just as it should boot, a pulse and then no screen display, but it keeps on spinning.

He is recommending returning the HD for warranty replacement, but I am afraid that I have some files on there (I have a small business) that I need. I know I should have backed up onto something else but it was only just new and I have never had a HD go on me before(no excuse I know). I am especially concerned that it may not be the HDD??

Would really appreciate any advice, especially if you think my HD is OK !!!!

THanks,
Rod