boot up baffle?

[pearlgem]

hi, started working on a computer with win95 that would not boot so naturally i put in a win98 boot disk and the c: drive contains what looks like some code. the d: drive where the boot segment is placed is fine and of course the boot disk is fine. this computer has never been on the net and is a p 150 with a 2 gig hdd and 32 megs ram..everything as far as hard ware seems to be working fine...
any idea's ???

thanks
pearlgem

[AnnMarie]

Hi pearlgem - Welcome to CTH. I have moved your thread to the Windows 95 forum. Your question will be seen by more members who may be able to help you there.

[jtdoom]

hi pearlgem

since this was a puter you have to work on, I think you are up to it, and have the means to do it.

why not connect the hard drive to another machine, and scan it against viruses?
Once it is found free of nasties, run diskdoctor, scandisk or something similar.

you can also find out what version of win95 was running that way. (one way is to copy, and then open the copy of system.dat in wordpad, and search for productkey, where you also find version...)
and then, with the same version bootdisk (which you can download), one can re-systemise the drive.

[Alfons]

Pearlgem, I'm confused. You mentioned that the Boot segment is on drive D. Are you saying that the OS is installed to drive D?

I'm assuming that this is a single disk that we're talking about that was partitioned into one Primary and one Extended partition and that the extended was fully utilized as logical drive D. The Primary Active Partition is usually looked at as drive C and this is the bootable partition. Therefore when you follow jtdoom's advise & load the system files, you should be doing this to drive C that holds the boot record not D that holds the OS Program Files.

I believe that the system files from any Windows 95 Startup Disk should have the same version of DOS. Windows 98 DOS is a different version. These files are: IO.SYS; MSDOS.SYS; & COMMAND.COM, also I believe it puts DRVSPACE.BIN on there as well.

[jtdoom]

hi alfons

pearlgem can find out which is the active partition by looking at the drive with fdisk

fdisk /status
esc

fdisk
y
4
esc
esc

the active partition is the one which shows an A under status
in a system with one hard drive, it will become C:

one can actually systemise all partitions.
pearlgem, when you get a booter for that 95 machine, YOU MUST make sure you have the same version than the windows version on that drive.. if not same version, you will have to run win 95 setup.

The first active in boot sequence will be booted from.

In normal circumstances, one gets an error message (error six) when one tries to activate two hard disks, but one can have two (or more) active hard disks in a machine.
example; like when you connect an active drive to another machine's IDE2 to look at it.

=======

it has to be scanned against virus.
and actually, that is the FIRST thing you ought to do.

I think windows scandisk or norton diskdoctor will find a problem, and I also think there will be a bunch of corrupt files in root of that hard drive's partition.
if repair works, all the better.
if not, there is not much use for them CHK files scandisk would create. (if they was part of documents, one can try stitch them together... It is no fun to do. A hexviewer can come in handy...)

I think pearlgem will have to run setup to repair windows.

worst case would be physical damage.
this would become apparent when scandisk runs, or when win95 setup encounters a problem.
let us hope not.

[pearlgem]

AnnMarie, Thanks for your warm welcome and sending me in the right direction.
I will be sure to learn how this forum works. : )



Hi Alfons, & jtdoom Thanks for replying.

What I mean for drive D: is where the virtual settings are placed when using a boot disk. I apologize for that I didn’t mean to confuse anyone,

It is a 2 gig hard drive (single disk no partition). I have done what was suggested, no virus’ just a mess of corrupt files but no bad sectors’ so that’s a plus. I am now re-formatting to see where this road ends with, of course, the owner’s blessing. A good learning tool right now and I do appreciate the help. I will let all know the outcome.

Thanks to all
pearlgem

[AnnMarie]

Good luck pearlgem :) Post back if you have any problems.

[pearlgem]

Hello all, Well i started the format and started trying to recover allocation files. needless to say it needs another hdd.

thanks for all your help

have a great weekend :D

pearlgem