have you enable virus detection in your bios? It might be a boot sector virus?

yeah tried booting from floppy - no luck - doh

i just dont understand how it can stop a healthy pc from booting it its just a slave drive on is :boggle:

have u tried booting the PC from a floppy? Change the settings in the BIOS too so it boots from floppy before the HDD. You should be able to run Fdisk and reformat and partition it if there is no alternative.

ok, pc wouldnt boot up this morning

the bios detects the harddrive and everything seems to be ok

now on boot up, it gets the the part where it looks for boot from a floppy, then after that i just get a blank screen with cursor flashing at top left

tried the harddrive in another pc as a SLAVE drive, and for some reason it stopped that pc from booting up too, same thing happened, removed it and booted fine

when ive tried to reinstall windows on it, it was the partitions are 'unknown'

is it dead? is it format time soh, or can it be recovered?