howdy..this is a gateway 433-c about three years old. worked great and the got hit with a couple of viruses. took it too the shop and got it ;so called fixed; it worked for about a week and BOOM would not boot into windows, so I let a few of my so called computer expert friends work on it and it got gradualy worse. I posted about it before and was told about the viruses and how to erase the HD but I couldn,t. I can get into safe mode but nowhere from there, no dos commands seem to work. I searched the archives in here for hours but couldn't find any problems like this. I tried to download a few win 98 bootdisk off the net but the comp said non system disk or disk error. so just for the heck of it, I tried the backup boot disk from my other comp with WINME on it. it seemed to try to booth with this disk and then said windows me edition has detected that drive C does not contain a valid fat or fat 32 partition, and then gives a few reasons why this may happen. all I want to do is erase this HD and reinstall win 98 or install a brand new OEM version of winme I just bought. I read somewhere in here that to use a boot disk d/L from the net that you had to run it,,not just download it, I don't understand this. any advice or suggestions very appreciated..thanx chmcg

Try this first. While in Safe Mode, go to Control Panel / add-remove programs / startup disk and create a startup disk. Now you can install the OS by using the bootdisk. Reboot the computer with the bootdisl in A:. When asked, choose load with cdrom support. Put your win 98 cd in the tray and at the A: prompt, type SETUP. This will reinstall Win 98. I would recommend you use Win 98 rather that Win ME. If you need to upgrade use Win XP or better yet Windowz 2000 pro. Good Luck. If you want to reformat the drive, I'm sure some posts will follow.

The bootdisk download isn't really the bootdisk itself...it's a program to CREATE a bootdisk. Just download the file to your desktop, then double-click it. You'll be prompted to insert a blank, formatted floppy into the drive to create the bootdisk. Then write-protect the disk (by moving the little slider). Another way to create a bootdisk is right off of your Win98 CD. Navigate to tools\mtsutil\fat32ebd & double-click the file fat32ebd.exe. Follow the prompts to create the bootdisk. Once you have a bootdisk that works, execute the command: fdisk /MBR (ENTER) Since you have (or suspect that you have) viruses, this will clear the master boot record, where many virii are known to hideout. Then format the HD & reinstall Win98. HTH Dave

Thanx so much for responding...when I said I could get into safe mode>> I mean when I start to boot and hold F-8 and go into where I have the options microsoft start up menu, but no matter wich of those options I choose it just goes back to a C >promt. but I did not create th boot disk as advised here, I'm going to do that next, and take a crack at that. thank's for all the help and patience. chmcg

WHA LHA...I'll be darned it worked, following your directions. the win 98 boot disk worked, but now it's telling me I have no fat or fat 32 file system. SO where do I go from here? thanx chmcg :O)

Once you've successfully booted from the bootdisk, type, at the a:\> prompt: fdisk and return. Y to large disk support. Then option 4. If it says 'no partitions defined' then ESC, option 1, then 1 again, Y to using the entire disk and make it active. When it's done, ESC and reboot. At the a:\> prompt type: format c: and return. Y to verify you want to format. When it's done go ahead and reboot again, making sure you choose cdrom support. Then at the a:\> prompt and with the 98 cd in the cdrom type: d:\setup or e:\setup (if d: gives an error message) and return. If, when you ran fdisk the first time and chose option 4 it said you already had a partition then, instead of choosing option 1 you would choose option 3 to delete the existing partition. Then ESC, reboot, and then choose option 1 to create a partition and follow the rest of the procedure above. Hope that clear enough. Fdisk isn't too hard to navigate through.