Problem accessing hard drive

[Justin Hanes]

After upgrading from win 95 to 2k everything everything worked for a bit then froze, and after rebooting would no longer recognize the
hard drive. I have no access to fdisk to reformat, or anything else. All I get is a prompt for the A: drive, which is the cd/rom. I tried disconecting and reconecting the h/d, and switching the ide cables between the cd and hard drive but no change. I can switch the
prompt to C:\ but all I can get from there is the volume label which says MS-ROMDRIVE, but I'm not sure what that means. Is there any way
to correct this? All the BIOS settings look okay, the hard drive is detected, but shows 0 kb for all sectors. Is there a way to correct this?

[Greg Carlson]

Justin,

It sounds as if your hdd is dead.. The MS-Ramdrive is the diagnostic drive which normally is assigned the next drive letter after C: -> if Ramdrive is C: then usually that means your hdd is not detected or has no drive letter assigned to it. Try hooking up to a different channel and verifying the jumper for cable select, master or slave depending on your cable. Upgrading from 95 to 2k will not cause you to lose a hdd in this way. If the hdd still shows 0kb then it probably is not spinning up and will need to be replaced.

Ciao,
Greg

[Justin Hanes]

I ran a diagnostic program from maxtor and it said the drive needed to be partitioned. Another program they had to set up the partitions wanted me to update the BIOS, but I'm having trouble creating a bootable disk. HP said to format a disk by right clicking A: then selecting "format with system files only" but I don't have that option. Do you think this will make any difference or am I wasting my time?