bootdisk from hell

[phr33kz0l]

Hi there,
After windows 98 completely gave up on me and some of my system files had disappeared I needed a bootdisk and got one from www.bootdisk.com. It did the trick and had cd-rom drivers which worked form my cd-rom aswell. However it created a virtual drive (ram) and mapped it as A:\ (usally floppy drive) and moved my floppy drive back to B:\. I fdisked my hard drive and formated it and then started installing win98 SE on my laptop.
When the win98 setup restarted the 1st time I was surprised to discover that the virtual drive was still there and that I could not in fact boot off a floppy anymore. It automatically boots off the virtual drive and kills the win98 setup. I cannot delete the virtual drive (correct me if Im wrong but it should disappear after rebooting anyways shouldnt it ?) and hence cant reinstall an operating system or boot off a floppy as the bios only gives me the option to boot either off C:\ or A:\ not however B:\.

If I try to run windows (which hasnt finished installing though) it tells me that therez a registry error and I then get a VFAT bluescreen.

Sorry about the length, Im just a bit confused as to what exactly Im supposed to do.

[i8088user]

This is tricky, see if you have an entry in your autoexec.bat file or your config.sys file that contains reference of the "Ramdrive.sys" file. You can access this by going to the Run command on your startmenu and loading sysedit.exe

If none of this works, try resetting your bios. Make sure just as a percaution you write all the settings down just in case the bios reset crashes your pc. Some AMI bios allow you to fake windows into thinking an area of ram is a hard drive. The ramdrive.sys also does this but is at the operating systems level.

MAKE SURE YOU MAKE COPIES OF THE AUTOEXEC.BAT AND CONFIG.SYS FILES BEFORE CHANGING THE JUST IN CASE A BOOT PROBLEM ARISES.

[Alfons]

Try This Page (http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm) and download the one entitled Windows 98SE OEM - this one always used to be a "clone" of what W98 made for you as a Startup Disk. There are some "strange" disks on that site that can cause you a lot of problems if you don't know what's happening and don't know how to edit in DOS.

[kingul]

Yes Indeed. I tried to build a bootable CD with theirs and I got all sorts of errors. With little knowledge, I fiddled around with a standard Millenium disk, amending lastdrive etc. Got a great result for my bootable Partition Magic CD.
None of www.bootdisk.com floppy writers would work with the Eltoro bootable CD build. They all produced write errors.