[DuoList] Mystery of the disappearing hard drive

[James kilfeder]

I've had a mysterious problem with a new (to me) duo 280.

I was trying to make a ramdisk, andput a system folder on it. I 
rebooted, and the internal hard disk had disappeared. I've made a 
boot disk, and rebooted from it. Still no sign of the hard drive. 
Then I made a ram disk, and put my emergency boot disk system folder 
on the ram disk. When I boot up off that, and run Norton disk doctor, 
disk doctor will claim that there is no problem on my still invisible 
hard drive(except that the system clock does not match the control 
panel clock). When disk doctor has got near the end of its task,  as 
it begins the last of the six boxes, checking files, the hard drive 
and all its contents will suddenly reappear. Disk doctor will say 
that everything's fine. But when I start up again, there's no sign of 
the hard drive again.

I've tried moving my emergency system folder onto the hard drive 
(renaming the old system folder), and using the cdev 'startup disk' 
to assign it. But still no joy.

Anyone able to explain, or suggest a way out?

James