'boot disk failure, insert system disk and press enter'.

[pkuti]

well, my computer was officially running on win 98. Then after some time it started hunging up, it wouldn't respond to anything at all. since even the keyboard was frozen up & ctrl+alt+del wouldn't work I shut it down via the off button & restarted it.Then it came up with the dreaded 'boot disk failure, insert system disk and press enter'.
Whenever I got lucky I was able to start it, but then the mouse wouldn't show.I could go to safe mode couple of times and even that it got frozen sometimes.
I took the easiest way by formatting the PC. I still get the 'boot disk failure, insert system disk and press enter' message.
How do I get out of this?

Out of frustration I've for

 

[Pennanti]

More than likely your hard drive has failed and the only solution is a new one. If you can still occasionally get into the disk, copy all important files off of the hard drive so you have them to put on the new drive.

 

[ImpetusEra]

Deffinitely sounds like a hard drive going bad. Couple things to try are a new IDE cable, you can swap it with the cd-rom cable for testing purposes. Next, use a boot disk to get to a DOS prompt and type in "chkdsk c: /f", assuming your hard drive is drive C. If it finds a bunch of errors and marks bad sectors get what you can off the drive before it dies completely. If it finds no errors try "fdisk /mbr" with the boot disk.

 

[pkuti]

Thanks buddies. Going to try all those options and let you know the outcome.