After several minutes, the desktop was up and the drive light flickered gently. Then boom! Unable to write to disk in drive C: Data or files might be lost Of course, I suspected the hard drive was going bad, but Maxtor's diags proved me wrong. Just to be safe I ran Fdisk /mbr which should have refreshed the master boot record. This is where my headache began.

Unbeknownst to me the system had been loaded with Norton GoBack. This utility is quite nice in that it can undo some nasty things done to your system. But it is also a large pain when it fails to load. One sneaky little trick it does without warning is replacing the Master Boot Record. When you try to access the partition with other software, it shows up as "Non-Dos Partition" (which is not true! it is a DOS partition with GoBack on it).

After much hair-pulling, I devised this attempted fix:

• Use a test drive to perform a full system recovery.
• Load Norton GoBack.
• Hook up original drive as primary on secondary controller.

Receive following error:

===   ===   ===   ===   ===   ===   ===   
Norton GoBack (126)

X - Norton GoBack has detected its partition signature
in the MBR on disk #2 but links to Norton GoBack's
dataIO.BIN) are broken.  To fix this
problem, Norton GoBack will need to scan your hard disk
for its data file and then restore the MBR and/or
BPB sector.  Until, this problem is fixed, you will
not be able to access this disk.

This problem was probably caused by a utility
such as a virus checker, multi-boot manager,
or disk editor.

Do you want Norton GoBack to attempt to restore the BPB?
===   ===   ===   ===   ===   ===   ===   

===   ===   ===   ===   ===   ===   ===   
Norton GoBack (148)

i - Norton GoBack has re-hooked itself into the MBR on 
disk #2.  Since Norton GoBack had been temporarily 
unhooked from your system, there is a possibility 
of some data loss.  It is recommended that you run 
ScanDisk on logical drives on this disk as soon 
as possible.
===   ===   ===   ===   ===   ===   ===   

Boot system just fine to the test drive and back up the original drive. Try booting to just the original, but Windows seems to be corrupt. Use test drive to boot and remove GoBack from both drives. Boot to diskette and am finally able to access hard drive "Non-Dos" partition is now "MS-DOS" (horray !) Run setup for Windows ME (oh well, that's what they bought) and it runs unattended. After rebooting a couple times, most everything is working. Recommend backing up important data and doing a full recovery on the system.

Also recommend never installing Norton GoBack on this system! Apparently, it caused the data corruption and was the source of all the trouble. It had been installed two days before the trouble began.