System can't find boot record

here's the story. my boss has p233 MMX on a VXpro-ii MB, 64MB Ram, PCI video, ISA sound and modem cards. One day he turned it on and got a "can't find boot record". brings it to my buddy (who's more a network guy than a hardware tech) to see what he can do. He got it to boot up on a win98 boot disk and tried to reinstall windows on C:. well it turns out the C: he trying to install on is a "virtual RAM drive". decides that the hard drive is toast and throws in a samsung drive (that had NT4.0 on it)he had laying around. now the system won't find a boot record on any drive. so i inhereit this mess. the original maxtor drive is still autodetected by the bios along with the floppy and cdrom. I've used the orignal win95 boot floppy and a "clean" win98 one i made off of my personal machine. I've scanned the floppies for viruses (thinking it may be a boot virus) but they're clean. it'll load the boot record from the HD and then display "boot failure from previous device". and will not find boot record on any floppy disk. the bios is a 05/97 amibios, which i've scoured looking for incorrect setting. if you hadn't figured it by now, the MB is a pcchips/hsing tech one nonsupported on their website. and they don't post an e-mail address. the email windriver shows for them is bad. i have the manual on CD but it was written in CorelDraw6 (I don't know anybody that has any version of corelDraw) all i have is a small booklet on jumper settings...
HELP!

i can accross that prob once
it was a nastly little virus cant remeber the name right now
but be careful it infects anything u access such as floppies, any floppy u access such as just a little dir command and it will infect it and anyother computer u try the floppy on
it wont be found by anyvirus scan really
the best thing to do is repartion and reformat the drives and the master boot record
if anyluck reply back

You could also throw a full install of mcafee on to a cd. Just copy the directory from a machine it is installed on on to a cd. Load a cdrom driver up in dos and then use the mcafees dos scanner to scan the drive. This also gives you the latest def files and will detect much more then a floppy scanner.

Also try using a util like microscope 2k to rebuild the boot sector or use fdisk /mbr to do the same from dos.

Although after rereading your post I am not sure either of those will help.

I am sure you have reset the bios with the motherboard jumper. I would also check the power supply and all your drive cables. Aside from that I would say to start looking for hardware problems and do general troubleshooting to narrow down where your problem is.

As far as the correl file, just use office to convert the file to a doc on load.

part of my problem is i can't even get into dos. the system looks for boot record, won't go to dos til it gets one. that's the dilema.

Throw in a ISA Controller and Check for virus (Stealth.B)

i seen that prob once before
the only way i solved it was i threw out all the floppies that i had inserted into the drive because they became infected and made a new boot floppy in win98 on a different system
then i repartitioned the drive formatted it and then did it again
then i used fdisk /mbr command to format the master boot record
after that everything worked fine
if this dont help try resetting the bios

yea, already tried using a "clean" write-protected floppy and resetting the bios. the fact it can't find the floppy boot record really bothers me. I'll try digging up an ISA controller (know I got one somewhere in my piles and see if that changes anything.

The VX motherboard probably won't recongnize your hard drives because they are too big. VX Motherboard's probably won't read a regular hard drive past about 10g or so without Disk Manager software. The old one was probably installed with Disk Manager software to get it to recognize. Probably EZ-Drive if it was a Maxtor or Western Digital hard drive.

The reason it read drive C as a virtual drive was because your network guy probably used an OEM Windows boot disk which will make the first drive letter available a virtual drive. It was supposed to do that. Your old hard drive is probably ok.

A way to fix it would be to download the disk manager software from the manufacturer of the hard drives website. Maxtors use Maxblast. Western Digital uses EZ-drive(which is really the same program). When you open it, the program will make a bootable floppy disk with the program on it. Then just follow the instructions.

Good luck

This does sound like the "Form" virus which will infect everything it goes near. Try installing this drive as a secondary drive in a system which is up and running and run a virus scan. This virus replaces a section of the Fat32 table with its own Fat16 table and makes it virtually impossible to boot from the drive. Any disk you use to boot an infected drive will contract the virus.

Try the MS tech Net knowledge base. You could try fdisk /fixmbr. None of this will help if you don't first scan the HD for viruses.