I am trying to set up and Acer Acros 486DX4 100, but every time I try to either format the hard drive, or copy files to it, I get this message stating "Invalid media type reading drive C:" The hard drive is a 1.5 Gb seagate, and I have already partitioned it. What is going on here? Thanks, Kelley

As long as the HDD has been partitioned properly, it looks as though your drive has gone to hard drive heaven. Another possibility is that the BIOS setings are incorrect. Usually it is sufficient to set the primary master to auto, if your motherboard supports it, otherwise chechh the HDD specs and set the BIOS accordingly.

Don't give up yet.

"Invalid media type reading drive x" usually indicates a FAT error, NOT a dead drive and definately not a BIOS/IDE controller issue.

The most common causes of this error are:
1. You havn't formatted the drive yet. I am guessing this is what is going on, since you said "I have already partitioned it.", yet you made no mention of formatting the drive. They are separate acts. Use fdisk to partition, use format.com to format.

2. FAT32 vs FAT16 conflict. If the drive is formatted with FAT32 (using a boot disk for Windows 95 OSR2 or later), and you try to access the disk with an older boot disk, you will get this error. Either reformat using FAT16, or get a newer boot disk.

Gluck

well , you can check the media type to see it is really a virus.. if you have used Debug before than Type at Dos prompt (Debug )
you should get this back (-) just type e 100 2 1 1 the media for a hard drive should be F8 if it is not type F8 and than hit enter or
do -w 100 2 1 1 ..if your unable to write to this location than possibly you do have a virus.

Sorry , correction at the dos prompt Debug and than type at (-) e 300 than you should see the media type (hard drives are F8 ) ..sorry for the confusion ...

IM HAVEING THE SAME PROBLEM AND I DID THE DEBUG THING BUT I GET THE SAME THING WHEN I PUT IN OTHER DRIVES

I am having a problem with my hard drive, I formatted it in win 98, copied files across to it, reinstalled my software on to another harddrive and went to access it but this message pops up "INVALID MEDIA TYPE"

HElp?!?!?!?

I am getting "Invalid media type reading drive C Abort Retry Fail" when I try to copy or format on my c drive.

This is on a Nimanitic laptop 200MHZ, 64MB RAM, 4GB HD. This is the 3rd drive I have installed since 1997.

When I first installed the HD we did a successful Format and got about 75% thru the Windows install before it gave a "Attention : A serious disk error has occurred while writing to drive C: Retry?"

I tried to Scandisk but it found corrupted files and I got tired of trying to correct all of em.

I went back and tried to reformat but it would only get to 2% and then give me a message "Not Ready Format Terminated".

I then tried to FDISK the HD and that seemed to work. BUT now I cant Format.

I have the same problem, and have tried to repartion but it doesn't work.
Try to help me

Ok ya all, First off thanks to everyone who posts here.

I just went through reformat hell with formating fdisk then the "invaild media" after you
1) Format your drive
2) Fdisk remove existing partiions \ clean fdisk
3) Format your drive

Vula it works like UthickCuntz says.

Ok, I have a HArd disk with windows 98. i downloaded a newer mouse driver than the one i had and the deleted the otherone. when i rebooted my display drivers where all messed up and i went to reinstall them and, no CD-ROM. 'ok', i thought just boot with a bootdisk that supports cdrom. well apperently it was infected with the FORM virus and now when i try to DIR c:\ i get 'Invalid Media Type Reading Drive c:\'.
i have very important information on this drive. if i format will i be able to get the data back?