The other day my comp. froze, which it does a lot, but when i restarted it, it prompted me in DOS to insert system disk. I found a Win98 startup utilities disk, and a Win98SE cd-rom to use when promted to start with cd-rom support. The next screen is still in DOS and has a A:\> prompt. From digging around online I've found support telling people to type "sys C:" at the A: prompt in order to copy the system files to C: so it can reboot from C:, but it says Invalid media type reading drive C, Abort, retry, fail. Obviously here i abort and I get another A: prompt. I'm able to Type "c:" in order to get a C:\> prompt, so it's seeing drive C. Anything I type in the C: prompt results in the Invalid media type reading drive C, Abort, retry, fail. I've also gone to the E: prompt and typed "setup," but that freezes as it's scanning system registry. From what I've read online, it appears that the drive is woking, but suddenly unformatted for some reason. Obviously I don't want to have to reformat and loose everything on my C drive, but I don't know what else could be done. Also, if I have to reformat C, I was wondering if there's anyway to salvage all the files on C: before doing so.

Put the win 98 recovery disk in the floppy and the win 98se cd in the tray. Choose load with cdrom support, and at the A: prompt just type setup. See if this works. You can also go into the BIOS and change the boot order to boot the cdrom drive first. The win98 cd is bootable.

You need to get a program such as Norton Disk Doctor (The DOS one that alows you to scan the drive) or Spinrite to see if it can repair the damaged partition.

looks like your MBR is bad. go to left panel and click on site search and type in BBR fix. you can find some old post on problem. reading them they say at a: prompt type fdisk/bmr but it looks like it just erases the mbr which would leave disk unreadable? check the bios to be sure it reads the correct disk type.

after more reading, google search for Master boot record, fdisk/mbr will replace the mbr. so it should fix your problem

Make sure the HD is properly identified in cmos. If so boot from a bootdisk and at the a:\> prompt type: fdisk and return. Y to large disk support, if asked then option 4. What does it say?