Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations John Tel on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

non system disk or disk error

Status
Not open for further replies.

confusedredneck

Technical User
Jun 11, 2008
4
US
this is all my pc will do , it will not load win98 or even dos
 
You have to be specific. Is this with a floppy inserted, or attempting from the hard drive.

What else have you done?

This only tells you that in the boot path of the BIOS that there is not an operating system seen.

Can you get into the BIOS, usually [F1] or [DEL] but depending on what you have it could be other keys or combinations?

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
i am booting from the hard drive and the os is windows 98 i have tried to reinstall windows and everything but it will not find an operating system
 
Did you make an emergency boot disk when you originally installed 98?

If so, you can boot from it and do a "sys c:"command. that will put the required files on the hard drive to allow you to at least boot in command line.

If you tried sys with a DOS6.22 you may be running into an issue with different fdisk programs, where 98 can handle more than a 2.1gb drive while DOS is limited to 2.1.

Boot with your DOS 6.22 and run fdisk and see what it reports, especially on the primary partition.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
I have to ask, does the BIOS see the Hard Disk you are trying to boot from? Does it actually recognize the drive as present?

If it does try downloading a floppy from bootdisks.com and booting with that, can you then change to the C: and run a dir command form there?
If you can then chances are Windows got corrupted somehow.

If you can't or the BIOS can't see the drive, chances are the hard drive is toast.


----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
OP has 2 threads in hardware showing an attempt at DOS6 load and failure to boot windows indicating that there is likely corruption of the system files.

Because the original config.sys had DOS based drivers I had suggested that he use the DOS6 as the starting point of any attempted repair to keep away from the "new and improved" fdisk that would be implemented with a bootdisk from the download site.

And yes, definitely a corrupted 98.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
In that case re-installing Windows over itself should correct it.

I've gone through all his posts and they all seem to stem from the same problem: A failed installation of DOS 6.22.

How exactly have you tried to reinstall windows?

Again a bootdisk from bootdisk.com should help.

You should be able to download a Win98 bootdisk with CD support. Boot from it, and then run the Windows 98 setup from there. You could use the fdisk and format to recreate and format partitions.

Again this is if you don't want to keep anything on the hard drive including the failed DOS installation. Which I would guess just overwrote windows 98's boot files.








----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top