Bad hard drive?

[innskeeper]

My kids have a PC, P3 450 that they said was acting up so when I went to boot up I got a message during the boot process that no OS was found. I booted again and now all I get after the boot screen (showing the hard drive and 2 cd rom drives) is a black screen with a blinking cursor. I tried a different cable from the hard drive to the controller with the same results. I switched the cable to the secondary controller same results. I used my western digital utility on floppy and tested the hard drive the report indicated there were no errors on the drive and the drive was fine. I tried booting with the Win 2k floppies (since the os is win 2k) but floppy drive stops working. At times the floppy drive LED would stay on but floppy disk wasn't being accessed. While running another diagnostic utility on floppy it got half way through the process and froze. I tried booting from cd but no go just black screen. Through the bios I set boot order according to what I needed to access first but no luck. Any other ideas?

Thanks

 

[Pilsnerpete]

Try installing win2k right over itself. If that doesn't work, install it clean from the cd.

 

[innskeeper]

 

[innskeeper]

Okay here goes, I tried a different cable same results. I switched the cable to the secondary controller same results. I used my western digital utility on floppy and tested the hard drive the report indicated there were no errors on the drive and the drive was fine. I tried booting with the Win 2k floppies (since the os is win 2k) but floppy drive stops working. At times the floppy drive LED would stay on but floppy disk wasn't being accessed. I tried booting from cd but no go just black screen. Through the bios I set boot order according to what I needed to access first but no luck. Any other ideas?

 

[innskeeper]

Just for the heck of it I tried a different power supply but same problem. Even though the os is win 2k and it won't let me boot from cd I tried booting from a win98 boot disk it wouldn't even try to access the floppy drive, but when I boot with my western digital lifeguard utility disk it will only run the diagnostic utility that checks the hdd for errors. Once the check is complete it says the drive is fine. When I try to run the EZ install utility or any other utility from the Data Lifeguard floppy the LED for the floppy drive won't even come on and it freezes. So I pulled the hard drive out and put it in my other pc and tried to boot when I got this message:

"Stop: 0x0000007B(0FX681B84C,0XC0000034,0X00000000,0X00000000)
INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE

If this is the first time you?ve seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:
Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives of hard drive controllers. Check you hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run chcdsk/F to check for hard drive corruption and then restart your computer."

I am not sure what this means whether the hard drive is bad even though the diag test says it's good.
Help!

 

[innskeeper]

I went into the bios again and just desperate to try anything I went to the IDE config and set a delay for the hdd. After it booted everything came back up. After a couple more reboots to make sure all data was there I went back into the bios and disabled the delay, booted and hdd came back up with no problem. I'm beginning to think the problem is with the hdd even though it came back up it's probably on it's way out. Once again thanks everyone for all the advice.