A customer brought me a PC which has a missing drive letter. They reported that they downloaded a program from cnet and then rebooted the machine and the Windows XP Home Edition screen is as far as the PC will boot. The bios screen appears, then XP seems to be loading but the computer restarts. Upon using a boot disk to examine the partition information, there is one partition that's status is listed as A, and it's 38000 or so mb's, (the hdd is 40mb.) The customer reported that their hdd was half used, 20gb's out of a 40gb drive. The fdisk.exe function reveals the usuage on this drive to be at 100%. On trying to preform a Format C: (for hypothetical testing, i didn't actually want to reformat) it says that drive C: is an invalid drive. Could this be a virus? What's going on with this computer? Thanks for any help you can give. Dsmith@4netconnect.com AIM - th3h00kup (0's, not o's)

they have xp on the drive, chances are most likely that it's using the ntfs file system, and not fat/fat32. you cannot access an ntfs partition from dos mode without the use of a 3rd party program. Check out http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm

Well i think that you should be able to change a NTFS to a FAT/FAT32 in the BIOS, Press F8 while the screen is loading and maybe, just maybe it will take you to the BIOS screen, and from there, who knows you may be able to start it in Safe mode, since it takes out everything that you dont need, and only runs with the things that you need, This is all that i know you can do, well, it may be locked to, but you cant unlock it unless you are in DOS, Hope this helped and wasnt a waist of your time. Sycotik_Demetia

To change to FAT 32 you would have to delete the NON DOS partition in Fdisk. Now to the origonal question. Boot with the XP cd. Go to the repair option. Type in fixboot and then fixmbr. Make sure you choose the C: drive. That should do it for you.

If none of that works, as a last resort download the gwscan from gateway.com and write zeroes to the drive. That will fix any and everything harddrive related.

I can't boot from the CD, the computer just keeps restarting. It looks like it's going to go into windows and the bottom of the screen has a little bit of blue screen, but then it just reboots again. I could use a boot disk to navigate to the cd - rom?

The BIOS has nothing to do with the partition type ie. FAT32 or NTFS and you don't change it there. Pressing F8 doesn't take you to the BIOS either, it takes you to the screen where you have the option of normal boot, Safe Mode, etc.