I've kept my old K6-2 300mhz (socket 7) computer for a long time. I haven't used it much, but I wanted to keep a "vintage" DOS/WFW machine around.

Every once in awhile I'll fire it up, and there's a problem I deal with almost every time. When I fire it up, the system can't detect the HD, and I notice it doesn't spin up. Now, I have 2 HDs, a 4gb and a 6gb that have the same basic system set up, divided into 2gb partitions.

I would have concluded that the drive was going bad if it was only the one drive; I suspect it's the HD controller gone bad, but eventually I do manager to get it to boot one drive or the other. I suspected a faulty power supply, since the drive doesn't spin up, but sometimes it will (eventually) work with HD, CD, 5.25 & 3.5 floppy plugged in, and sometimes it will (eventually) work if I only connect the HD to power. Once it recognizes the drive, I have no problems with it until I leave it sit for a long while. But it doesn't lose the CMOS data.

Can anyone suggest things to try to diagnose what is going on?

I was wanting to "upgrade" this system to Win98, maybe re-partitioning the 6gb drive; I have a 486 motherboard I'm going to build into my DOS/WFW system, and a 286 motherboard I'm going to build into a straight DOS system. So I was hoping to use this old unit to fill in the win98 "hole" in my collection (after all, it originally did run Win98). But if something on the MB is going bad, especially if it's something my limited skills can't fix, I need to know so I can find another socket 7 MB before the price gets too unreasonable.

if it's the power supply, I can work around that. If it's the drives, I can get CF adapters and go that route. And if it's the controller going bad, I can begin shopping for a new MB. But how can I find out what really *is* wrong?