Mike, first make sure that the Hard drive's IDE and poer cables are completely inserted in the motherboard as well as the hard drive. Next, do a simple test. Try booting from a cold start, without previously beidng turned on. If windows only starts when you do a warm ctrl-alt-del reboot, you could have a problem in your cmos, virus or settings. If the drive ONLY starts when you soft boot, you might be experiencing Stiction, your hard disk may be getting hung up until it has been spun for a while. stiction only occurs on older drives, as in 2 years or more of age. It is most likely to happen when the computer has been sitting off for a while. reply if you think it could be stiction, and i can help you with some more details. -Wess Bechard ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike" <mideyoung@xxxxxxxx> To: <sysconfig1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2001 3:02 PM Subject: [sysconfig1] Boot Error > Hey... My aunt came to me with a problem and I cant figure out whats going > on. First I turn the computer on and it comes up with a Boot Failure. So I > figured the best way to attack it would be to fdisk and clear the master > boot record along with the partion and start over. First I wanted to check > and see if the hard drive was the cause if the error and if everything was > still on the drive. I tossed my Win98 Startup disk in and asked to start > with no CD Rom support and I did a dir in dos and the drive still had all > the contents. Than I rebooted with the disk in and at the selection screen > I soft booted out with ctrl-alt-del and took the disk out and sure enough it > boot right into windows with no trouble. So now I am wondering why its not > booting up right away. What should I do to solve this problem? > > Thanks > Mike > > > >