Problem changing drive/ 98se

[suhaila]

My mother-in-law has an old Gateway comp with a 900mhz Athlon. The hard drive completely stopped (no running sounds at all) a few months ago, after months of slowing. I recently decided to try putting an old hard drive from another Athlon in it (60 gig working drive with XP Home on it), and booted with a 98se bootdisk. We wanted to put 98se on it, so I never tried booting from the hard drive. System softbooted fine, but gave a message about bad battery. I changed the cmos date/time, and proceeded with fdisk. Fdisk didn't run smoothly, and stopped at 58% a couple of times...lots of "trying to recover allocation unit" messages in the process. I then tried running XP from cd, and using the format procedure on it. That went to 100%, but then gave an error about not being able to access hard drive. I rebooted from bootdisk, and ran scandisk, which ran very quickly and gave no error messages.

Pulled that drive out, and put it a drive from an older working Gateway that has 98se installed (7.2 gig from a 450mhz comp). When it started, it gave a message about a boot sector virus, which was unlikely, so I rebooted and turned off automatic virus detection in BIOS, and then rebooted from c:. The boot goes quickly to the point where where Norton loads, the Norton scan runs fine, then shows
c:\>REM [Header]
then the Windows screen loads. The screen goes to a few colors, Windows starts trying to install new hardware, and things pretty much halt. If I boot from floppy now, I get a message that "W98 has detected that drive C does not contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition". DOS shows c as the RAM-Drive. If I boot from the hard drive, though, it's obvious that c is there.

I realize that putting a hard drive from another computer is not the best thing to do, but I'm just trying to find out if the computer is worth keeping. Ideally, I'd like to be able to use one of the old drives, or buy a new drive if I can determine that the rest of the hardware is in working order. Any suggestions on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated.

[Murf]

Welcome to CTH

The problem with the drive that had XP on it, is probably due to NTFS partition, and you cannot take a drive with XP on it and put in a different computer, 99% of the time it will not boot up.

Using the 7.2 gig from a 450mhz comp, reboot but this time after the post screen (before Windows logo comes up) start tapping the F5 key. This will by-pass autoexec and config sys files, which it appears it is using.

The bootdisk is not recognizing the drive, get back into SETUP do a auto detect, does the HDD show up?? then Save & Exit. You may also have a corrupted boot disk. Go HERE and download to the desktop the file:
Windows 98 (http://files.frashii.com/~bootdisk/newjersey/boot98c.exe) Custom, No Ramdrive |


Now double click on it to extract the boot files to a clean floppy disk.

Now set boot order to floppy and boot with this bootdisk, should get to the A: prompt no problem.

Now type

sys C: (hit<enter>) to transfer the boot sys files to the hard drive.

Now try FDISK

[suhaila]

Doing the auto-detect on the HDD was the turning point. After that, I used your bootdisk and had no problems running fdisk. I reinstalled 98se, which went smoothly, but was missing some drivers. I'm going to locate those using my computer, and then get everything set up like it should be.

Thank you so much for your help, Murf! You're the best! :happy:

[Murf]

Glad ya got it going...Thanks for letting us know, need help with drivers post.