Visit the www site of your disk drive manufacturer and download and run some
hard disk drive diagnostics.

When you have confirmed that the drive is operating correctly, use the
FindPart utility to examine the partitioning in detail:
http://inet.uni2.dk/~svolaf/utilities.htm
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP W95/W98

Steve;

I got the exactly same problem, and I did as follows

1) I switched off (power off) the computer (not restart
by ctl+alt+del) and then switched on (power on), and used
win98 bootable floppy to boot the computer

2) The computer in this way could detect the c: drive,
and from a: prompt, I used the command

scandisk/all

to scan the c: drive and also performed surface scan. The
problem on my bad clusters were patched during surface
scan by the scandisk utility.

3) Then I formatted c: drive using command

format c:/u (u stands for unconditional)

Whether you format or not will be ur own decision. And in
case there are no errors on ur hard disk (checked through
scandisk from DOS), then you may even skip Format step.

4) Then I went to e: drive( my cd rom drive) and run the
win 98 setup to load windows. I assume when you boot the
comp through bootable floppy disk, ur computer is able to
detect cd rom.

Hope this may help.

raM

Sounds like what I just experienced using Symantec to scan
for 'reported' virus of WIN95/CIH spaces 1445 & ...CIH
Chernoyble.  Syill not sure it's just spoof from Symantec,
plus therie bugs they likely plant to force people into
paying them to 'fix' PC's.  But anyway, I got mine back up
for a while by using the start floppy, going to help file
there (3), and waiting til it told me C' was loaded, then
removing the floppy, and then hardbooting, and then while
coming back up, held down the ctrl key until I saw Windows
startup flag and to my surprise, it loaded up and worked
for a while, until I got a fatal exception, see my posting
in GENERAL & SFI on the 18th.  Good luck, as if you had no
other problems (unlike me) it should work, or so the help
files in startup says, and it did for me.