"Operating system not found"

[Maryn]

Hi

My Dad's computer has given him this message. boot disk and startup disk are not much use to him.

Cables all ok, inside and outside of case,
Hard disk is showing up in BIOS
He got this message when trying out startup disk:-
"Win 98 has detected that drive C does not contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition"

Any ideas?!!

It's Windows 98 S.E. with Norton Anti Virus 2004, 192MB RAM, Office 97, otherwise this pc doesn't really give trouble and he doesn't mess around with it either! The only thing he has done differently recently was to install a HP photo printer.

Look forward to hearing from you!!
Thanks!

[Sylvander]

QUOTE
The AVG Rescue Disk is a special diskette where the most important parts of your computer’s boot up data will be saved. In this backup diskette, the contents of the Partition Table, Boot sectors and some other internal data will be saved. These areas are often targets of computer virus attacks and their damage can (and mostly will) cause the malfunction of the whole operating system – your computer cannot be started.

Repairing such destruction can be very difficult job. But if you have a backup copy, restoring the damaged areas is easy and safe.

In addition to the backup copy of the system areas there is a special AVG-SOS program stored on the rescue disk to handle the saved data.
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Did he make one? :) [fingers crossed]

If he did he uses it to re-build his "Master Partiton Sector" [or whatever it's named].

[YODA74]

There are several possible causes.

1) The drive may need to be partitioned. To create a partition on the drive, run FDisk from MS-DOS command prompt.

2) You may be using third-party disk-partitioning software. If you ar using this type of software, remove the Emergency boot and restart your computer. Then, follow the on-screen instructions to start your computer from a floppy disk.

3) Some viruses also cause your drive C to not register. You can use a virus scanning program to check your computer for viruses.

Try testing the hdd in another system that will let you know if the drive is bad or the motherboard. I suspest that the drive is bad. With luck it is just bad (corrupt) not dead.

[Whyzman]

I would suggest running the harddrive diagnostics for the drive. These can be downloaded from the harddrive manufacturer's website.

The are self booting and will analyze the drive for possible problems...