I get the feeling i have a virus because i made a boot disk a couple days ago on a floppy than just to see if it worked i put it in and booted up just as it started to setup linux off the floppy my bios virus detection came up and told me it thought that the floppy had a virus well i stopped booting and turned off my system for a better look at it later in the mean time other family members booted using the floppy ever sense they turned the computer off i havent been able to start it right. For example X server wont boot. and when i tried to fix the problem with the CD it sayed i was out of hard drive space ( i know i am not) than when i turned off the system and it went through its checks it came up with a bunch of failures about unmounting and hard drive problems now i cant uninstall and reinstall because when i try to run setup the ramdisk never starts it just sits their what did i do and how do i erase my hard drive?

By the way i don't think that the hard drive failed.

you can try fdisk from windows...i know i know its windows but it doesn't run off of ramdisk you will probably have to reinstall linux but if you format the entire drive it should be ok, (yep its alittle bit hard to loose all your files...i know from experience, but if you are out of options go for it

About the bios warning, it just warning you that something is trying to write to the MBR (f.ex. if lilo is getting installed), you can turn it off in the bios setup.

The other things I don't know, if you are dualbooting, does windows work OK? Maybe it's a hardware failure in your ram... Just a wild guess

well i went ahead and fdisked it but still had lots of errors so in a last ditch effort i low level formated the hard drive. Worked like a charm now woo hoo i guess. Sorta sucks that i lost all my files