Can't boot Win98 PC

[pantichd]

Hello,

I have an AMD Athlon 950 PC running win98 that has decided to stop booting up

It wouldn't boot from the hard drive so I thought maybe I had a bad hard drive, virus or something like that so I tried a boot disk.

It gets to the point where it displays this message and then nothing happens:
"Searching for Boot Record from Floppy . . OK"

Can anyone offer any suggestions for what I can try next?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[pantichd]

gargouille - You're right, I did leave a few things out. It's been a frustrating experience.

A few months ago this same computer had problems and I traced them back to a bad power supply. I switched it out but I'm afraid that it might have done permanent damage.

At least that's what it sounded like based on the symptoms and what I was hearing on this board and from talking to others.

I did try booting w/o hard drive hooked up. Same result. I also tried hard drive in another pc with no problems.

I finally gave up and decided to try another motherboard because I was too frustrated to try other things.

As for the CPU running w/o a fan - I didn't let it run long. I'm sure I'd have fried it if I had. All I did was try and boot up. Right away I noticed that the cpu fan didn't work.

I tried connecting the fan to the system fan connection with same result. I went out and bought another fan, hooked it up and it worked.

THEN, when I booted up I started getting floppy disk (40) failures. After tracing that down it sounded like it was a bad cable so I tried a cable I knew was good and that didn't do the trick so I tried another floppy disk. Finally worked.

After that ordeal I'm just glad that the pc is up and running. When I have the time I'm going to try the old motherboard with another CPU and fan in another case and track down the real problem.

Is it possible to get a Lemon pc? : )

I feel like I got one here. I've had nothing but problems with it. That'll teach me to buy a prebuilt no-name-brand pc. From now on I'm building them myself from scratch. I did one like that earlier this year (my first time) and I've had great results with it.

Thanks ALL for your suggestions and feedback. Your help was really great!