Grab your Phillips, it's...
The Latest from The Screwdriver List!
It sounds to me like you could have a virus--or perhaps some bad hardware.
If you want to load Windows ME it sounds as if you will need to go to
friend's machine and download the necessary video driver--then copy it to a
floppy and take it to your machine. But since you seem to have Windows 98,
I suggest you skip Windows ME. It is a not-very-compelling "upgrade" to
Windows 98. (And most everything that ME added can be downloaded for free
from the Microsoft web site, once you get Win98 running and a connection to
the Internet.)
Try these steps to see if you can access the hard drive--and to refresh the
system area on that disk:
Boot from a floppy (the emergency recovery diskette from most any version
of Windows 9x or ME will do here just fine). Now run this command:
FDISK /STATUS
This should give you a report on all the hard drives you have and show you
how they are partitioned. Look especially for the information on which
partition (if any) is "active." If none is active, then you have told your
BIOS, in effect, that it isn't to load any OS from any of the partitions.
If the boot sector program is damaged, running
FDISK /MBR
will recreate it properly (and wipe out any boot sector virus you may have).
Also, when you boot from a floppy of the sort I mentioned, it will create a
RAM disk (a fictitious "disk" drive created out of some RAM) and load a
number of utility files there. These should include the SYS command. Running:
SYS C:
will refresh the system files on C: (once it is formatted and accessible).
I'm not sure this sequence of steps will fix your problem, but knowing what
you see at each one may help us diagnose what is going on more reliably,
and thus guide you to a solution.
Good luck.
John
At 06:54 PM 5/6/01 -0700, you wrote:
>Grab your Phillips, it's... The Latest from The Screwdriver List! To clear
>up potential confusion: I have, of course, already formatted the C:
>drive. I was just trying to reformat it to see if I could get the C:
>drive to be made readable. When I do an Fdisk, it says the drive is
>already partitioned. I am at a loss to understand as to what is the
>status of my C: drive.
>
>
> >Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 18:18:11 -0700
> >To: The Chief
> >From: Maheep Singh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >Subject: RAID setup help needed
> >Bcc: Charles E. Bowman
> >
> >I am trying to setup a RAID=0 (stripping) configuration on my Abit
> KT7/RAID system. I was not getting the RAID to setup with each of the
> two HDDs plugged into separate connectors as masters. A friend of mine
> told me to change the jumpers to cable select. I did, and the RAID
> immediately set up just the way it should recognizing both drives as
> masters on their respective (primary/secondary) connectors. But now, I
> have another problem.
> >I am trying to load the O/S. The Win ME froze when initializing setup,
> and that happens when you have a Nvidia graphic card minus the ME
> required driver. I don't have an OS as yet, so I can't install the
> latest driver. It's a catch-22. Win 98 also cannot get into
> setup. And Win 95 keeps trying to initialize, without moving
> forward. The C: drive cannot be read, and asking it for a "dir" gets the
> message: Invalid media type reading drive C:. It asks if it should
> abort, retry, etc. If I try to format the C: drive, it
> states: Insufficient memory to load system files. Format terminated.
> >Does someone have experience with this kind of problem? I have a 1 Gig
> Athlon Thunderbird, and 256 MB memory. Enough to tackle a NASA
> problem. If only I could load up an OS.
> >Please help.
> >Thanks.
>
>Maheep Singh
=======
John M. Goodman, Ph.D., author of "Peter Norton's Inside the PC," Seventh
Edition (Sams 1997, ISBN 0-672-31041-4), and Eighth Edition (Sams 1999,
ISBN 0-672-31532-7).
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