What to do --> "Boot Record not found on IDE 0. Insert new disk and try again"

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Hello, last night I went to a friends house to check on laptop that had some problems with its screen, so i used the monitor from her desktop to use the laptop...the laptop had nothing serious. However, after plugin back in the monitor to the pc I told her to turn it on (pc & monitor) to see if they were connected correctly. Now, all hell broke loose A few seconds after turning the pc & monitor on, the monitor goes into "sleep" mode like if it was not receiving a signal from the pc, and then the pc rebooted on its own, without even finishing the first boot. After rebooting and posting, I get "Boot Record not found on IDE 0. Insert new disk and try again". It could have said "on IDE 1" but i dont remember well now. Anyway, I don't know what to do. I entered the Bios setup and the year date on the Bios was 1901!?!? The HD was set to primary master and the mode set to "USER". I think its an AMIBIOS, year 1999. The motherboard uses the SISXXXX chipset i think, since its the name i see when the pc posts... The cpu is a PIII 450 mhz with 128mb ram and 8.4 GB HD. That is all i know for now. Please help me try to fix this problem. Is it possible to recover the "boot sector" and continue using the pc like before, or will i have to reformat everything and install win98 again? BTW, the peculiar thing is that the pc never read from the floppy drive during the boot, since i tried to boot with a boot disk, but i got the "boot sector..." message before it checked the floppy. Please help. Thanks in advance.

 

[miken]

Sounds like a boot sector virus. Short your cmos and try booting, if that doesn't work then boot with an AntiVirus boot disk and check the whole disk for virus's. Otherwise you will format and restore. If you do have to format and restore, Fdisk the drive first with the command fdisk /mbr to rebuild the master boot record.

 

[DaddyG]

I think you lost your CMOS setup values. May the cmos battery is bad. If a drive has the wrong values, the Boot Record won't be found.

 

[esung]

re-detect the HD in the BIOS setup see if it helps.

the wrong date on BIOS indicate somehow the value in your CMOS is lost and resetted. and hopefully by entering the correct values back and the system will be back to normal. but you might need to replace the battery if samething happens again.

 

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Thank you all for your replies, and info. I now have the pc for the whole weekend to try and fix it. Thanks again