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I was trying to install Win95 on a 486 (running win3.1) yesterday. I should have just formatted the hard drive and installed from DOS. But instead I used fdisk and screwed up the whole computer. I think I accidentally deleted the primary DOS partition. Now the computer won’t boot either from A,B drive or C drive. This computer has two floppy drives, A drive is 5 ¼” floppy and B drive is 3.5”. I even tried disconnecting the 5 ¼” and boot from B, but it still won’t boot up. Please help.
1. make sure your A B and C are working (floppy drives and Hark disk drive)
2. Make sure your motherboard sees your Hardisk and floppy drives.
3. Run a bootable disk to start DOS.
4. go in fdisk and creat primary partition again then format the partition.
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Fdisk cannot effect your floppy drives. Only changes in the BIOS can do that.
1. Check your BIOS, make sure each floppy drive is correctly configured (last drive on the ribbon cable is a:\ drive and properly set to 1.44mb or whatever.)
2. Get a Win95 boot disk from
www.bootdisk.com
and create it on another computer. You might also get a DOS 6.22 boot disk just in case.3. Create the boot disks. Verify on whatever computer you use to make then that they are bootable.
4. Boot your problem computer using a boot disk.
5. Run fdisk from the boot disk. Check to make sure you have a DOS primary partition. If not, delete whatever partition you have and create a primary DOS partition. You may have to reboot once or twice during this process.
6. Format the hard drive using format on the boot disk:
format c:7. If you get this far, then you'd want to install Win95.
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Thanks for your tips.
I did use a bootable disk in Drive B (1.44MB). But it still wouldn't boot up. I know it is a workable bootup disk because I used it on another computer and it worked.
When I turn on the computer, the light on the floppy comes on and off, then a message comes on and says: Use F1 to reboot or F2 to enter setup. There is nothing much in the setup (one page). It lists floppy drives and other standard devices. I have tried different start up disks. But everytime I get the same error message. The computer is not seeing the hard drive at all.
What else can I do?Thanks again for your help.
Peter
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You can only boot your computer from drive A. Put your boot disk in drive A, reboot, & see what happens.
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It didn't work. I put an 5 1/4" boot disk (dos 5.0, 4.0 and even dos 3.3) in drive A, it checked the floppy, but didn't boot up. Then the same message came on said "use F1 to reboot or F2 to enter setup".
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Something has to be wrong in the setup or it would not keep prompting you to enter setup. Are you positive your floppy drive parameters & hard drive parameters are correct? Are you sure you did not do anything else to your computer besides fdisk. I have used fdisk on many occasions, made my partitions, & have never had this problem. What is the name of your computer if you dont mind me asking?
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It is a gateway 486 dx/50.The computer was working fine till I used fdisk. I didn't touch anything in the setup.
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I have had similar problems with ancient Radio Shack computers with modified DOS versions. They won't boot from anything except that modified version.
Call Gateway. They are usually decent folks.
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MY ASCENTIA LAPTOP WON'T BOOT FOR A DRIVE. This computer has the removable A AND cd drives. I had the A drive checked and it's ok. But the computer gives me messages that it can't read drive A. Is there any command that I can use in my config or autoexec files to make it work. This computer really needs to be setup again, but the only back up to reboot is on floppy disks. The reason why I need it done is because every time I connect to the internet and I never see the web page because I get a message Invalid VxD dynamic link call from VNBT (O1) + OOOOF4A TO DEVICE "VTDI" Service E.
What must be done to fix the problem?
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