The puter gets a primary drive error. I went into the BIOS and change to AUTO and the error message goes away. The machine finally starts to come up but goes into SCANDISK and hangs at 99%. After that, the puter wont boot at all. I put in a floppy start up disk and get to the A: prompt. The CD drive never lights up and wont open. I figure the hard drive has bit the big one (Seagate 20.4 GB) but what about the CD-ROM? Could a virus cause this problem? It is a V-Box machine - AMD k6-550, 96MB of RAM, 20 GB HD, 52X CD-ROM, on-board sound, on-board AGP video, and on-board modem.

What exactly is happening at startup now?
Do you hear beeps, see lights(FD, HD), or see anything on the screen?
If you see anything on the screen, at which point does the boot process stop?

You can here the HD spinning, the HD light comes on, the floppy light comes on, but no CD-ROM light. I have checked and changed all the ribbon cables. The BIOS recognizes the drives. The message at the bottom of the screen states that it can't find the boot up stuff on the floppy, IDE-0 and then hangs up on the search of the CD-ROM drive.

A virus can affect the hard drive, but it should have no effect on the CD-ROM drive.
There may be a problem with the motherboard if both the hard drive and CD-ROM drive problems occurred at the same time.
Make sure both IDE controllers are enabled in BIOS.
Make sure the hard drive's and CD-ROM drive's cables are securely connected. You may also want to replace both ribbon cables.
Insert the boot floppy, start up, select 'Start Without CD-ROM Support', press Enter, type fdisk /status. If nothing shows on the screen, then the hard drive has died. If you see the hard drive's data, then restart with the boot disk inserted, type C: at the A:\> prompt, press Enter, type fdisk /mbr, press Enter.
If this does not work, repeat the above except type sys c: at the A:\> prompt.
If still no luck, then both drives may have failed, or there's a MB problem.

I got the CD-ROM drive to work. It seems the draw was off track. By using a screwdrive, I got the draw to come out and seem to work just fine. I tried the C: SYS on the hard drive to no avail. The HD is a Seagate 20GB and looks like the manufacturing date was 05/2000. I tried their Website to see if it was under warranty and they said it was an OEM drive to check with the PC maker. I'm going to try EZ Drive to see if the reformat software recognizes the drive. By the way, the drive is listed in the BIOS.

Did you also try fdisk /mbr on the hard drive?

I tried the FDISK again and things started to happenin. I did a fdisk status and it showed the actual hard drive info. I then did the fdisk sys c: and it seem to take. It turns out whatever the previous person did, they completely wiped out the hard drive. I am currently trying to reload Windows.....thanks for the help...