Help Please!

I am having a prob with WIN 98- 2 System.

When I start up it opens up to my desk top fin but the seems to freeze and i can't do anything. If I leave this for a while I get a blue screen which says:
Disk Write Error
unable to write to disk in drive C:
Data or files may be lost.
Press any key to continue.
I then get a black screen which I have left overnight to see what would happen.
I have pressed the reset key and get
Invalid Boot Diskette
Insert BOOT diskette in A:
I then inserted the boot disk which runs till I get Windows 98 detected that drive C does not contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition.
Have tried to run FDISK and get No fixed disk present.

Any ideas where to go from here.

FDISK is not supposed to repair anything. It's to set partitions on fixed drives. This wipes out all data on the selected disk.

You may try scandisk c: to try repairing the file allocation tables. If prompted for "lost clusters", select discard (NOT convert to files).

It's possible that your hard drive has died. You may try to boot from a Win98 bootdisk with CD support and reinstall Windows from the CD, by typing d:\setup (or d:\install, I don't remember exactly). Choose the same directory where Windows was before (probably c:\Windows). If your data is still present, this will overwrite any corrupted OS files, thus preserving your data.

If the disk was wiped out, you'll not be able to install and will need to run FDISK on hard drive 0, create a primary partition, make it active and format the drive, then reinstall Windows.

If it's died, nothing much we can do about, I fear.

Chris

Is this a desktop or laptop?

Does the machines bios "see" the drive on bootup?

If so, is it correctly identified as to make/model and capacity?

How old is the machine. It could be the cmos battery is dying/dead and the hard disk parameters are being lost. (Heads/sectors/cylinders)

Test the hard disk with the manufacturers analysis tool(s); Hard Disk Analysis Tools - Major manufacturers