🚀 go-pugleaf

tanman wrote:
> 
> Since my wife will be out of town until Mon, I decided to fool around
> with her computer and install win95 so I could play with it instead of
> using my system.  Well all hell broke loose and I had to uninstall it.
> All of a sudden the computer would not boot into the C Drive.  So being
> a nitwit, I reformated the C drive hoping this would do the trick.  But
> it still will not boot up in C.  I have to use a Emergency disk in the
> Adrive to boot up.
> 
> Then after I get the dos prompt in A, I cd to C and do a check on the C
> drive using different utilities which shows the c drive is there and no
> errors on it.  I used MSD, Norton, and PC Tools and they all show the C
> drive is there and formated to 450 megs and everything in order.
> 
> However as soon as I take the emergency disk out of the A drive and
> power on I get the bios showing 32 megs of ram and then showing 1 fixed
> HD, 1 floppy drive, 1 Parrallel port, 1 serial port like it should, but
> then it stops the screen is blank with a little blinking cursor in the
> upper left of the screen.  I have to ctl-alt-del and insert the
> emergency disk and then it works.
> 
> Can anyone help me out before the wife gets home so I can get this
> system working again.  All info would be appreciated.  I.   I will be
> monitoring the NG and Email very closely hoping some knowledgeable
> person can get me out of this fix.
> 
> Thanks in advance.  Don

You said you reformatted the drive too???

Here's how I'd approach it then...

a) Decide what operating system you'll be putting back onto her
computer.  This rather depends upon what systems disks you still can
find in the house (DOS, Win3.1, Win95, etc).

b) make a bootable floppy disk WITH SYSTEM FILES using your computer. 
To do this, insert a blank disk in drive A: and type:   format a: /u
/s    then hit enter.
Now, also copy the files  FDISK.EXE and FORMAT.COM onto this disk you
just made.  If your system is running Win95, then these files will be
found under c:\windows\command directory.  If you're running DOS with
Win 3.x, then look under c:\dos directory.  When finished, be sure the
write protect tab on the floppy is set to "protect" or "lock" or
whatever they want to call it.

c) go to wife's machine and insert your disk into her drive A:  If her
machine is off, turn it on and wait for the A:\> prompt to appear.  If
her machine is on, hit the reset button or the power switch and, again,
wait for it to reach the A:\> prompt (or something similar to it).

d) if you feel comfortable, run FDISK from her floppy drive a: and view
the parameters for the hard drive to make sure nothing got screwed up. 
There should be at least one Primary DOS partition.  Otherwise, proceed
right to this next step:   run FORMAT from the floppy drive a:  again by
typing:    format c:\ /u /s   and press enter.  Choose "yes" at the
warning message -- you have little choice at this point -- and wait
'till the process is done.

e) at this point, pressuming that your CMOS setup boot-order settings
haven't been changed, remove the disk from drive a: and hit reset.  The
machine should now boot from drive c: if you've performed everything
according to these instructions.  If it won't boot from drive c: at all
even at this point, enter the CMOS setup program and verify that the
boot order does, in fact, include drive c:  You'll also HAVE to run
FDISK to be sure that drive c: has a Primary DOS bootable partition and
not something else

f) assuming all is well, get your setup disks for your chosen operating
system, and run the install program.  Once finished, you'll still have
to proceed in an orderly fashion to re-install all of her general
software too.

Well, I don't envy your task of explaining to the wife about her
system... on the other hand, you COULD do what I do... (grin) ... ALL
computers are MY computers; therefore, if I screw one up temporarily --
too bad... use a different one until I get it re-adjusted.  'Course, I
usually dont screw them up either, heheh!

Good luck!
_____________________________________________________________________
Garrett Krueger              1-612-771-9209                   CleoSci
Snr. Prgrmmr/Consultant                                  PO Box 17037
gkrueger@cleosci.com     http://www.cleosci.com    St. Paul, MN 55117