Okay, so I've been having a strange intermittent hardware failure, which a few minutes ago became a MAJOR failure. Previously, I'd be in Win98, and have the file manager constantly windowed (which I'm aware opens more than 300 files to do its job). Then my HDD would seem to freeze with the access light lit continuously, and while it was doing so, it would also jump back and forth to accessing my CD-ROM -- even though I don't keep my CD-ROM loaded with any disk. Weird.

Frankly, it sounded like my IDE cable(s) had gotten loose from the motherboard, but I've checked and everything's secure. While I was at it, I disconnected the 24x CD-ROM -- on the off-hand chance that that's the part that's defective (or so Dave's been claiming for months).

The dumb part now is that when I go through the CMOS self-check, where it Auto-Detects the HDD's first and then boots them, the CMOS is now detecting "Primary & Secondary Slave: None". I did make sure to go the CMOS setup and change the boot sequence from "C,CDROM,A" to "C only", but that made no difference. Also, I don't recall that the HDD LED light is supposed to be "on" all the time during the RAM check during the self-test, even *before* the boot sequence...

Question (1a): What's going on here? My Bios is toast? I've got an Award Bios version 1.0a on probably an ASUS Pentium 233 mainboard, with somewhat newer Western Digital and Maxtor HDDs. (1b) Could a messed-up CD-Rom connection or driver have really led to all this? I thought not, but... (2) WHAT EXACTLY is the CMOS *doing* when it auto-detects the HDDs? If it tries to get a response from the ID-FAT from the HDDs and not getting anything, then I'm toasted because the main HDD could be fried. But surely not both drives. (3) Why the heck does my CMOS think both my Masters are Slaves? True -- I don't have any Slaves. But it's never had problems doing Auto-Detect before... Though it *did* always read my WD as "Matsumi 4something" and the Maxtor as "None".

Wolf "aaaarrggh... I can't STAND the peripheral conflicts created by plug 'n play, gimme jumpers any day" spirit