A friend asked me to look at his Mom,s computer. It is a mess. When I turned it on it posts and says "invalid partition table". I tried to install my WIn 95 start up disk but is says " I/O error". I tried a DOS 6.2 boot disk and it loads but I cannot load the DOS program to drive C: It says invalid drive speicification. I checked the mfg. of the HDD and it was Qauntum so I went on-line and found the specs and compared them in CMOS and found a difference. I had already used CMOS to try and auto-detect the drive and laod defaults etc.. I changed the drive specs to the new but similar ones I found and repeated all the previously mention procedures. I cannot get anywhere at all. I keep getting "invalid partion table" without the boot disk and no C: drive with it. The only disk the A: drive seems to do anything with is the DOS boot disk. I even tried to run FDISK/mbr but it just says "bad command or file name" as it does with any other DOS commands I try. Cannot format,fdisk,copy or anything else to the C: drive. Even sys C: did nothing. The history on how it got like this is a bit patchy but apparently it all started when my friend loaded AOL on after adding a CD ROM. This is the first and only disc that went into the CD ROM as far as he can remember. Also his mothers friends have mucked with it and I am not sure but I think it had Win 95 then they installed WIN 3.11 for WOrkgroups and could not because they did not have WIN 3.1. I don't know much more than that but it seems this system has had a few butchers working on it. I have disconnected the CD ROM for now. The controllers are on a card. The system is a 486 with 16MB RAM and 201MB HDD. All the connections are correctly attached so I don't think they did to much mucking about on the inside other than to install the CD ROM and soound card. Any suggestions would be appreciated very much. Thanks and ciao Kevin Switzer

Man the drive is dead. D E A D Dump it!

Final answer? Second opinion anyone? Is there no way to load the boot strap onto the hard drive. Something. It worked fine until AOL was put on. Why can't the partition table be reconfigured or something?

Do you have fdisk.exe on your boot disk?

Frank is an idiot and you don't seem to know what you're doing very well. Go to http://www.bootdisk.com/ and download a windows bootdisk. Download http://members.xoom.com/the_hacks/progz/Killhdd.bat to the flioppy disk and when you boot up with the disk, run killhdd.bat and then FDISK to create a new primary partition. After you've finished creating the partition, then reboot and run FORMAT C: /U /S Then try to reboot without the floppy disk. If you have problems, email me. If not, install windows.

TACT: a sense of what is fitting and considerate in dealing with others, so as to avoid giving offence. :-)

I AM MISSING MY PRIMARY DOS PARTITION ON MY WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR.21200 HOW CAN I RETRIVE THAT.