Thanks for the advices.
Done all you said to the letter, & scandisked, defraged, scaned but to no avail. In dispare reinstalled winXPsp2.
It boots fast but after the "Welcome" bit, goes to a lighter bleu full screen and hungs for ever.
The Bios shows that Primary & Secondary Ide is NOT detected. Only one CDR drive shows detected.
NO flickering LED though.... !@"%$#?!.
Regarding backups I am almost OK, as this PC's HD was imaged (Ghost) with mine and anything we do is backed up to each other via my cabled network.
This second PC escaped whatever happened.
Is there anything else I could do to save the situation?
before try to boot with my "MaxBlast" floppy to reformat & repartition again?
hmmm.... not detecting the IDE drives in the BIOS?
That sounds like it could cause problems. Enter the BIOS and select the controller your boot drive is on. Check and see what the options are for that. If it is not already, set it to AUTO DETECT and see if the drive pops up.
Also, verify the controller is indeed enabled in the BIOS. Some BIOSes will have an option for enabling controllers.
I cannot see how that could be the case because if the controller was not enabled it would not see the drive at all.