"mjm4u" wrote in message
...
:x
A friend brought me over her computer last week--told me it just
"stopped"--appears to be an old Gateway 2000--when I turned it on,
got a message stating invalid system disk, remove--of course, there's
no disk inside, so I'm assuming perhaps a hard drive
situation--unplugged the drive so that a Win98 startup floppy would
take over the booting, which it did, but when I tried to run fdisk, I
get a message stating no fixed disks present--rebooted the system with
the same error message, tried running delpart and got "no hard drive
found"--does it sound like she's screwed and needs a new hard drive
to anyone else?

Thanks,
Mike


That's a classic symptom of a dead CMOS battery. When the battery dies, the
CMOS loses the hard drive settings (among other things). Replace CMOS
battery, auto-detect hard drive (hopefully you won't have to manually
program it), save settings, exit, done. -Dave