I have this old laptop, a "zeos notebook 286" and i havent used it in years(it worked fine the last time i used it). but today i booted it up and the bios says that the hard disk failed to initialize. I'm pretty sure it hasnt been roughed up at all(unless somebody dropped it when we moved or something) and i was wondering if its possible for a hard drive to just go inexplicably or from not being used enough or something. I'm not sure how old it was, i think it was used when i got it so the hd could have gotten a lot more wear than i know. Also, i'm looking into options as far as boot disk OS's and/or disk repair that will work on it(floppies, it doesnt have a cdrom drive) i'm trying to find some kind of linux distro or old dos boot disk that might work on it. so far i've tried a couple linux floppies from http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/ and a fairly recent dos boot disk with no luck. if anybody can tell me where i can get what i need, i'd appreciate it. I'm not sure how much ram it has... but its probably not alot(i think the hd was only like 4 mb).