I had windows 98 on my pc up until

[Guest_imported]

I had windows 98 on my pc up until a few days ago, when i found the reason for my machine being so slow was that it did not support the amount of ram i had, nor does XP, so i decided to attempt to install 2000, and chose the NTFS file system for my HDD, the installer failed, so now i had an NTFS hard drive, only compatiable with NT, and 2000, so when i attempted to reinstall 98, it failed to recognize the hdd, even after numerous fdisks, so in the end i decided to ditch windows all together, and install a version of corel linux i got free with a PC magazine, it formatted the HDD for linux, then that installer failed, now, windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, or Corel Linux will install, windows due to HDD incompatablity, and now no linux, because the installer failed, rendering my pc useless, i have tried numerous applications to format the drive back to fat32, and have failed miserably, any ideas, would another version of linux install on that partition?

 

[BobMCT]

Been there, done that!
If all is lost on your HDD, and it sounds like it is, then either boot from a CDROM or from a Windows boot diskette (can be an emergency boot diskette that you got from someone or made on another machine). Be sure that it has the utilites FDISK and FORMAT on it.

Then, after booting, at the A:> prompt, execute FDISK and tell it to use your entire drive as a single partition. When that's compete it will require a reboot. Do so. Then run FORMAT C: /S to format the drive. Following that you should be able to reinstall windows.

If you've got access to a copy of Partition Magic, the job can be a lot simpler but the above will get you back. Its a long trip but you can get back there.

Goo luck.

 

[yowza]

I had a similar problem and had to get Partition Magic to get around it. fdisk wouldn't do squat. PM is a little cheaper then a hard drive.

Yowza

 

[Snipor]

I had this problem once. Took me hours to fix it. First of all, get access to a computer. Go here:

http://falcon.jmu.edu/~jarvislb/utils/boot_cd.html

and download the exe for win 98 boot disk.

then run the exe on any computer with a disk in the floppy drive and it should creat a bood disk if you don't have one. Now go throught the bood disk and delete everything you don't need there. All we want is it to boot to a prompty. So take out the himem, and stuff. Now, go to this website:

http://www.alberts.com/authorpages/00013305/prod_115s.htm

and download the bootmanger zip file. Once downloaded, unzip and copy file "Efdisk.exe" to your boot disk.

Efidsk.exe is a dos utility that recognizes almost all partition formats. Now take the boot disk and put it in the computer you're working on. Make sure to have floopy as your first boot device in bios. It should load to a command prompt. At that time, type: Efdisk.exe, and the program should run. You should be able to delete all the partitions and then reboot and run fdisk.

good luck.