Name: abe Date: September 12, 2000 at 13:48:38 Pacific Subject: cannot boot even from DOS startup disk
Comment:
I recently partitioned my HD to get it ready for an NT install. The NT install didn't work so I wanted to re-partition the drive, thinking that that might be part of my problem. I deleted the primary and extended partitions reluctantly, but knew I'd be safe with my handy FreeDOS (an open source free version of MS-DOS) boot disk. WAS I EVER WRONG! The FreeDOS boot disk boots me to an a: prompt,and there I sit. I can look at the directory of the a: drive but all other commands (format,FDISK etc) give me a BAD COMMAND OR FILENAME error. And the C: drive is totally unreadable. I was booting from this disk successfully yesterday! Just looking for some clues as to what I did to my HD, and how I might be able to recover. My PC is an IBM 350 pentium.
Format and fdisk are both external commands, to use them you need format.com and fdisk.exe on your bootdisk. I'd recomend that you go Here and download a bootdisk. There's also a good one here.
;-) Yeah I know pretty pathetic but I had to prove I had some kind of an edge on you didn't I? (rhetorical question) How did I change the subject line? I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you, so basically it works like this: Cut and paste the form to a htm/html file, name of your choosing. Edit the value of the hidden subject input box to what you want, type in the details as normal then send. Of course it could have gone horribly wrong and I'd have looked like an idiot, calculated risk which payed off. Don't know if Justin (or moderator(s)) will appreciate it much though.
HTML tags in the subject line, but it just cuts out anything enclosed in them. And for some unknown reason if you enclose the whole thing it reverts to a previous subject line. I think that I've found an alternative to what I was trying to achieve however. I'll find out when I test it later.
my hd settings are out of wack and i cant even boot dos im running it from a intel 386 on a win3.1 os i tried about 10 diffrent start up disks it just keep's trying to boot from my floppy and then it says it cant find an os on the hd even though it's on there i checked it i dont use 386's much and i dont know what to do i cant even get to the setup screan without unpluging my hd and then I can get into the motherboard setup but it dosent do me much good when i can't get into dos