intermittent disk failure

I've got a machine running W95 which often is fine and often gets disk i/o errors. If I reboot it might come up fine, or like now won't boot and instead says

"failure to boot from disk "

Is this a bad hd or might it just be a loose connection in the box? As it happens I have another box with a bad mobo so maybe should just swap the hd from that one into this box, or is there something else to try first?

Marty

 

First I would try replacing the drive's ribbon cable with one from the other machine.
During boot do you see any information regarding a "disk manager" or "drive overlay ". You may need to reinstall that program.
Have you run Scandisk (thorough) lately (not a likely solution, but you never know)?

Is there any other information from those error messages?

Could try running the harddrive manufacturer's utilities.

Matt