Fix the boot sector?

I ahve a 1.3-4 gig hd, so if it would cost me even 1 cent, I wont go through with it, the hd aint worth it.
Anywho, on the the problem. About 2 years ago this hd stopped working out of the blue, I think it was after the cord was yanked out of the wall (my mom was mad :-) ) and i couldnt get it to work, well I put this harddrive into what I thought was a broken machine (Celeron 500MHz 128megs of RAM) I popped my Win98 CD in there just because I was going to try for th last time, and, IT INSTALLED! But now, I need to boot with that cd or a bootable floppy. Im drawing the conclusion, that the boot sector of the hd was fried or somthing, is there any way I can fix this? its rather annoying to need a bootable disk everytime!

umm... question. What is your first boot device set to in the BIOS? I'd check that first and then your boot.ini file.

I have it set for floppy then cd rom then hd (if I have no cd or floppy in thats bootable, it checks the hd and then does nothing basicly..)

are you sure? Try setting floppy, then HD, then cd.

Well, it worked but, I wonder why it didnt before(before I installed windows)