PC assistance, if you don't mind....

Factual Questions
1

I’m not sure if this is a MPSIMS kind of thing or not, but it is definitly a GQ as well, so I’ll throw it up on here…

My PC is jacked up. After much working on by a friend, it will load up and run ok… however, if it gets unplugged, when I plug it back in to get the HD to boot, I have to boot from my Win98 CD. After that I can turn it off and on no sweat… but if I unplug it, I have to boot from the CD again.

Any suggestions?

It’s a generic box from Fry’s. The clock and everything else still work and hold the time, so the motherboard battery is good. Anything else?

2

Your battery might be dead. If so, your CMOS/BIOS (?) settings are not saved, and maybe boot from CD is the default setting.

Does your date change in the BIOS too?

3

Per the previous suggestion your BIOS battery could be bad. Another possibility is that your friend partitioned and reformatted your disk without making the hard disk partition “active” (very simple to correct). If that was the case it would behave as you have described and operate normally except that it would need a boot CD or floppy to start up.