I need as much help as possible with this one.

When I boot a floppy at school, I can't access the hard drive. I need to know how to fix this ASAP.

If I type "DIR C:\" It basically says that the drive doesn't exist, but the thing is - none of the other drive letters work, either.

I'm not really good with this sort of thing, but I figure that the boot floppy doesn't do everything, because the same screens come up before floppy boot that come up before windows. This leads me to believe that the hard drive is being used. And if the hard drive is being used, then a boot floppy should somehow be able to access the hard drive directories. Thing is - they just... don't.

SO... I need to know how to let the boot screen "see" the local hard drive - this being windows, program files, etc.

PLEASE help me as soon as you can - I'm not very good at waiting and this is driving me INSANE!

Depends on the version of DOS.

DOS 6.x or prior will NOT see FAT32 nor NTFS.

DOS 7+ will see FAT32 but *NO DOS* will see NTFS.

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If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

M2

It's going to depend on what dos version you're booting with and the OS on the hard drive. Older dos versions only recognized FAT16 partitioned drives. XP will be on a FAT32 or NTFS partition. So, for example, a dos 6.22 bootdisk won't see a drive with XP on it.

Later 95 dos, as well as 98 and ME, would see FAT32 but not NTFS.

If it turns out your bootdisk is capable of seeing the drive but isn't doing so, there may be a drive overlay on it. The overlay may be there because the machine has an older bios, for security purposes or because something like Goback has been installed. When an overlay is installed, the overlay software must load before you can access the drive. The overlay software is on the hard drive so it doesn't load when booting directly from a bootdisk.

You'll have to figure out which of the above applies before you can fix anything. Running fdisk, option 4, after booting with the bootdisk may help. If it shows a non-dos partition then it knows a drive is there but can't access it

"When I boot a floppy at school, I can't access the hard drive. I need to know how to fix this ASAP."

The HD is probably NTFS.

Good DOSes (FreeDOS, Enh.Dr-DOS) do support
FAT32, M$-DOS 6.22 not even this.

For NTFS you can try NTFSDOS or NTFS4DOS

ASAP.

Why are you booting from a Floppy in the first place? I've Hacked computers with this method and it's not worth it. I hope you are not doing the same! There is no reason to use a floppy or any other boot device at a school and or college. Please tell us more info. as to why you need to do this.

I agree with stuffie999. What are you up to???

It's a good day when you learn something