I am sure everyone reading your plight will agree that even if they
want to make a suggestion they don't know where to start.

You don't have to write an essay but, at least tell use if you
added/removed components, if you were inside the box and rearranged
jumpers and wiring, or if the system started behaving badly out of the
blues.

I can tell you a few things though. When a hard drive is going bad you
hear a sound like rolling marbles or clicking/knocking inside the box
when it is powered-up. Also, a dead hard drive will not allow the PC to
boot to the point of seeing the desktop on the system.

My feeling however is; you probably have a configuration problem and
the hard drive is not "dead". I would suggest that you peek inside the
box and make sure your jumpers are all in the correct position. If you
have a CDROM/DVD ROM drive on the same cable with the hard drive,
please double check to see if the jumper on the hard drive is set to
master and that the jumper on the CDROM/DVD ROM is set to slave. If you
have two hard drives on the same cable make certain one is set to
master and the other is set to slave.

When that is done, go into your BIOS Settings and make sure all drives
are recognized in the BIOS and that IDE-0 is set as the first boot
device.

If you reboot the PC and you still get the same error I suggest you use
an 80-pin data cable and enable smart drive within your BIOS. If you
already have 80-pin data cable and the problem still occurs, then you
should try another cable because it might just be that the cable is
bad.

If you do all that and the problem is still there, I suggest that you
repartition the hard drive and re-format. During the format process, if
you notice the message "bad sectors" or "recovering lost
allocation units", I suggest that you change the hard drive because
if the allocation units are fully recovered during the process of
formatting, you will still get intermittent problems later on when
using the computer.

NOTE: Before going into all of the above, open your box and make sure
that all connectors to the IDE controllers on the board are snug and do
the same at the connectors where the drives are. You might just have a
partially loose connector, but who knows?