Little Brother formatted hard drive...Please Help

[jdiggs25]

My little brother thought he was doing something good & formatted his HD. He then tried using the recovery CD that came with CPU but it is damaged & gets stuck half way through. The 98 boot disk isnt working. I do have a Win2k disk but it is not bootable. What can I do to get this cpu running again?



Althon 950
20gb 7200rpm HD
128MB RAM
ATI Radeon 8500 LE 64MB Video
Toshiba 3in1 CD/CDRW/DVD-ROM

[ZANEY123]

Why do you think the win2k isntbootable it should be as far as i know.

the only thing i could say set the bios to boot to the cd and insert the 2k cd-rom in the player and it should boot to it with no promblem>>

Zaney123

edit:

If you are trying to install win98 go to http://www.bootdisk.com/ and get a new win98 start-up disk and then boot to the floppy,

have you ever done a OS install or is the first time?

[jdiggs25]

Its not bootable because it is copy of the original & I tried & it wouldnt boot. I will try what you told me. Thanks for the reply

[ZANEY123]

What OS do you want to install?

[jdiggs25]

I woould like to get it started & install Win2k

[ZANEY123]

then if the cd is not bootable,,just get the new bootdisk from that site boot to that then once you get to the a:\prompt just find the cd letter which should be e:\ and try to enter E:\ SETUP and see if that will start the OS it might be another entry to get it started bu i am pretty sure that is the command to enter!

[GaryRouth]

Hi Jdiggs, & Zaney

Just another thought for consideration: if you were happy with Win98 and the computer in general (before the current trouble), a phone call to your vendor would probably result with a replacement Recovery Disk sent to you at little or no cost. These are pretty effective for major brand pcs, they have all the drivers right there on them. Otherwise you may spend a fair amount of time chasing down drivers. To reinstall the software that came with the system you'll want a recovery disk also. Win2k is a nice operating system, but can be particular about game software, if that is what this pc is mostly used for. You'll need a new set of drivers for most everything if you do decide on Win2k, and Win2k versions of the programs you want to run would be best.

Are you sure the Recovery CD is damaged? It may be that little brother deleted the hard drive's proprietary partition that the Recovery CD needs to run. Check the cd disk itself to see if it looks scratched or smudged. If only dirty, you can use a little window cleaner & wipe gently from the center hole out to the edge in a straight line to clean it (a 90 degree angle to the tracks). Most Recovery Disks include the option to completely Reformat/Reinstall: if you'd like, try it again with that option.

. . . Gary

[hmm - one more thing: install problems can be the drive itself having trouble. Download the drive diagnostic program for that hard drive from it's manufacturer's website & run it. That will tell you if the hard drive is failing. The drive diagnostics download will create a bootable floppy: you can boot right to a DOS diagnostic program]