I downloaded UltimateBootCD and BootIT and will be trying those later today. For those of you who suggested hardware settings, boot orders and jumper settings, thanks, but all of that was fine. The boot order was CD and the Primary Hard drive (Floppy was not in the list at this point) and the CD disc was removed prior to booting from the hard drive.
Running fdisk from either Win98 or Linux didn't solve it, because something is preventing me from writing to the MBR. That's actually what is happening here and I think that I need some sort of "Brute-Force" MBR writer/formatter.
As of my original post, this is the second NEW hard drive to give me this problem (I always have a few new drives lying around), as well as the original drive that started this whole post.
So far, the only thing that has had any measure of success was Fajar's suggestion of sleep and coffee (I passed on the jokes because they don't mix well with sleep or coffee! Grin!).
I've yet to try HarM's suggestion and/or the tools which I had to download, but those are next on my list. But ultimately so far, something is preventing me from writing to the MBR at all. That's the only consistent thing that's happening here - my inability to write to or update the MBR.
Since this will be a fresh install once it's working again, I'm not concerned about 'borking' the drive, so as long as these new tools don't hose any other parts in the system, I'm not worried about any damage that can happen to the drives. My supplier has a decent RMA policy and I know he'll take them back on "Over the Counter Exchange" from me (He's my brother-in-law) because he doesn't want to face the "Wrath of Mom" this Sunday!
The only reason that I'm suspecting the motherboard is because the very first drive I had in this system ended up with disk errors, and then this problem appeared. The M/Board doesn't have any mention of BIOS anti-virus protection which has been typical with Asus. Add to that the fact that the BIOS usually warns you if something tries to write to the boot sector of the drive and I haven't seen anything like that with this board.
But the fact that something is preventing me from writing to the MBR has me very curious too. This is the first time I've ever seen this at all in about 10 years, and re-doing the BIOS would usually kill any TSR or other virus embedded onto the motherboard.
So, Thanks Robert for the suggestion about bootdisk.com, but I used a Win98 CD (original) instead to prevent any possible virus from renewing itself.
Thanks HarM - Your suggestion will be one of my next attempts.
Thanks Brant - but there's no floppy in the drive.
Thanks Mikkel - The boot order is 100% OK.
Thanks Aron - But there's no data to lose and as long as the hard drive is the only thing damaged, it won't be a problem.
Thanks Stephen - The proper partition is active. Just call me 'Danger Boy'!
And finally, Thanks to Aron and Alan for their software suggestions which are next on my 'hit-list'.
I'll get back to you guys late today (I'm off to do a small LTSP network), once I'm back from my jobsite.
I'm hoping it will be something minor or trivial that I've overlooked.
If anyone has another idea, please keep them coming. I'll check in once in a while from the jobsite to see what's what (IMAP is a wonderful thing!), since I don't go anywhere without Mr. Laptop!
Adios Amigos! Buenos Dias!
-- Lanman Registered Linux User #190712
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