Boot Problems

[dodds]

Help,

In trying to uprgrade from Win 95 to 98, i have "lost" my hard drive.

I used fdisk to try and format my hard drive since the setup from the win98 CD rom did not work as win 95 was still on my system. I used fdisk to delete the logical partition on an advice from a colleague, who said that this formats the hard drive.

Now the win98 setup still does not work and I cannot read anything from my hard drive. The dos prompt c:\ does appear but nothing can be read from it.

I tried creating a logical partition on fdisk - no luck.

I tried loading win 95 back on the hard drive - no luck.

Unfortunately the matter gets more involved - before upgrading i tried to add another hard drive to the system, and used a program "IBM disk manager" to partition the new drive to fit in to my system. I'm not sure if this introduces another aspect to my problem, but when trying to reload win 95, an error appears saying that i need to remove compression software before continuing.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Drew]

Originally posted by dodds:
Help,

In trying to uprgrade from Win 95 to 98, i have "lost" my hard drive.

I used fdisk to try and format my hard drive since the setup from the win98 CD rom did not work as win 95 was still on my system. I used fdisk to delete the logical partition on an advice from a colleague, who said that this formats the hard drive.

Now the win98 setup still does not work and I cannot read anything from my hard drive. The dos prompt c:\ does appear but nothing can be read from it.

I tried creating a logical partition on fdisk - no luck.

I tried loading win 95 back on the hard drive - no luck.

Unfortunately the matter gets more involved - before upgrading i tried to add another hard drive to the system, and used a program "IBM disk manager" to partition the new drive to fit in to my system. I'm not sure if this introduces another aspect to my problem, but when trying to reload win 95, an error appears saying that i need to remove compression software before continuing.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Drew]

Sorry, I am new to this and accidentally posted with no comments! I am a novice computer guy but have recently had a lot of experience dealing with tempermental hard drives. FDISK does not format the hard drive. FORMAT does. You have to FORMAT after you FDISK because that allows the new partition to take effect. Ensure the system reboots after the FDISK and before the FORMAT. The procedure is FORMAT X:, where "X" is the letter of your hard drive. This will clear your hard drive of everything. If you have a bootable floppy disk, you can format your hard drive and reload Win 95, and then upgrade to Win 98 after that (unless you bought a standalone copy - that you can load right on). The difficulty is that after you FORMAT, you have to have a way to allow your computer to access the CDROM so you can load Win 98 -- the hard drive will be a "non-system disk" and will be unusable after it is formatted until you load the operating system on it.

So to sum up:
-ensure you have a bootable floppy disk (may have to ask a colleague) for the operating system you want to load
-format your hard drive using the FORMAT command
-reboot with the floppy and then you should be able to load Windows on your CDROM.

Hope this helps your problem!
Drew

Originally posted by dodds:
Help,

In trying to uprgrade from Win 95 to 98, i have "lost" my hard drive.

I used fdisk to try and format my hard drive since the setup from the win98 CD rom did not work as win 95 was still on my system. I used fdisk to delete the logical partition on an advice from a colleague, who said that this formats the hard drive.

Now the win98 setup still does not work and I cannot read anything from my hard drive. The dos prompt c:\ does appear but nothing can be read from it.

I tried creating a logical partition on fdisk - no luck.

I tried loading win 95 back on the hard drive - no luck.

Unfortunately the matter gets more involved - before upgrading i tried to add another hard drive to the system, and used a program "IBM disk manager" to partition the new drive to fit in to my system. I'm not sure if this introduces another aspect to my problem, but when trying to reload win 95, an error appears saying that i need to remove compression software before continuing.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[dodds]

Cheers drew,

As i am now replying on my own PC, you can tell that youre advice worked.

Cheers,

K.