annoying prob...not booting

jimmythawrench · #1 April 28th, 2004, 06:35 AM

hey guys,

i have a toshiba laptop running win98, and the other day the missus was using it. she said windows booted, then a blue screen showed itself, and the computer shut down. now windows will not boot because it cannot detect c drive. i tried using a bootdisk to fix things up, its now saying that c drive is either:

1 not partitioned (can rule that out)
2 may be using third part partitioning software (ruled out also)
3 a virus may be causing it to not detect c drive. this is a possibility..

now, is there a way for me to fix this without needing the win98 cd? because i happened to leave it at home (australia) and i dont have ready access to one. any help would be excellent as i was supposed to be selling the piece of junk

to upgrade. i can boot with cd support btw.

cheers, -jimmy

**degsy** · #2 April 28th, 2004, 02:43 PM

Welcome

Does the BIOS detect the drive?

If it does then:

Quote:

1 not partitioned (can rule that out)

Can you double check that.

Can you boot from floppy? if so use a Win98 startup disk to boot into DOS and run FDISK. Choose 4 to display current drive information and see if the drive has a valid partititon.

jimmythawrench · #3 April 29th, 2004, 07:39 AM

hey degsy,

yeah i can boot from floppy, i made a bootdisk from another machine and fired it up. did as you say, and to my surprise it has no partitions at all. so whats the go? partition away? i wont lose any files by doing this??

btw, besides the missus, what could have caused it?

-jimmy

**degsy** · #4 April 29th, 2004, 02:25 PM

If the drive is detected by the BIOS but has no partitions then it seems the drive was corrupted.

Unfortunately you will loose all data.
You need to repartition the drive, then format it, then install the Operating System.

**Murf** · #5 April 30th, 2004, 12:37 AM

Did you use FDISK to check if the partition was there?

It may be a non-dos partition if a drive overlay program was used;

If you used FDISK and selected View Partitions what did it say?

jimmythawrench · #6 April 30th, 2004, 10:39 AM

hey guys,

yeah i used fdisk to check, it seems that there are no partitions at all. corruption was my first thought, but i was hoping it wouldnt be. there is no possible way to recover any of the files i have there?

cheers guys, -jimmy

Fireguy · #7 April 30th, 2004, 11:49 AM

YOu can go to hotfiles.com and into disk management tools and there are demo and shareware programs for data recovery. Here's a link to make life easier... http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3150-2248-0.html?tag=dir
Good Luck

jimmythawrench · #8 May 2nd, 2004, 04:05 AM

thanks guys

-jimmy