That's what I was trying to say: although the PM 'Recovery Disk'
(mainly a
boot disk with PM on it) shows the partitions on both disks as present and
with no problems, the boot disk DOS can't see them--not even C:\--even
though if you don't use the boot disk, it's clearly using the C drive to get
the message: 'Type the name of the Command Interpreter....' as I described
previously.
I think this may go back to a thread back in April, or March, in which
you and cquirke and several other people got involved, but then it was a
question of Restarting in DOS Mode. Although I finally thought that I had
the
answer in the question of the receipt of the Windows shutdown broadcast (and
the answer may still lie there) I was never able to fix it, and other things
(the machine I'm using now) came to the fore. Unfortunately, I only
archived a few of the posts, and I was using the MS support interface at the
time. The server doesn't seem to have retained any posts prior to the
beginning of May, so I can't find the thread there, and it probably wouldn't
do much good, since I doubt I could convince anyone that the two are
related. Would take even longer to explain why I think so, and it's
irrelevant, if the thread's not available.
Obviously, this rambling reflects the state of my understanding, but it
comes down to: If PM can see the disks and the partitions, (1) why can't a
boot disk see any of them, and (2) how does one access anything on the disk
if the boot disk can't see it. Along the way, I might mention that this is
an installation without any older DOS on it, so that it would be deadly to
overwrite IO.SYS with a DOS 6.22 IO.SYS. Any of the files would have to
come off the W98SE installation disk, and that's a little difficult as it
stands. I certainly don't want to reformat the disk.

Thanks,
Joe
"PCR" wrote in message
...
http://support.microsoft.com/default...41&Product=w98
Err Msg: The Following File Is Missing or Corrupt...
(187641) - When you start your computer, you may receive the following
error message: The following file is missing or corrupt: COMMAND.COM.
Type the name of the Command Interpreter.

It says...
......Quote article...................
RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem, use the MS-DOS 6.x Upgrade Setup Disk 1 to
restart your computer, and then use the SYS command on drive C. To do
so, follow these steps:

1. Place the MS-DOS 6.x Upgrade Setup Disk 1 in drive A, and then
restart your computer.
2. Press the F3 key when MS-DOS Setup starts to exit MS-DOS Setup.
3. Type sys c:, and then press ENTER.
4. Restart your computer.
......End of quote....................

HOWEVER... here are some warnings...

This will copy certain system files (IO.sys, Command.com & perhaps
MSDOS.sys) from the Startup Diskette to C:\. (It also sets the BPB drive
number to HD0, so that it is now in the bootstrap. It does so, no matter
whether it is HD0. To boot it, one must still move it to be HD0,
however.) You may now be able to boot to Windows, if all folders are
intact. If not, some further adjustment need be done to "MSDOS.sys",
that was copied to C:\. The floppy has just a shell of it. Well, remove
the floppy & boot.

Oh gosh! Here are some warnings from Jeff Richards, MS MVP W95/W98,
about "SYS C:". DON'T DO IT, he says, if:

(a) "Major errors were reported in Scandisk."
(b) "A drive is moved from one machine to another", because of the next
two, maybe.
(c) "The BIOS setting for a drive is changed (eg, LBA to LARGE)."
(d) "A drive that uses overlay software is operated without the overlay
loaded."


--
Thanks or Good Luck,
There may be humor in this post, and,
Naturally, you will not sue,
should things get worse after this,
PCR

"jt3" wrote in message
...
| Yes that was what I was recalling something about--as I said to
Curt,
| all my refs went down with that machine.
| The problem here is that this is wierd--it's clear that the boot
code
| is working to some degree--'Starting Windows 98' comes up first, which
it
| normally wouldn't show, then it comes up with 'Type the name of the
Command
| Interpreter (e.g. C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM)' cr'A' even though
there's no
| disk, boot or otherwise in the floppy drive. Also, putting in the
startup
| disk doesn't get me anywhere--after choosing boot without cd-rom, to
| simplify it, it just hangs with the floppy drive trying to access
something.
| But it seems that this must be coming from IO.SYS, since there
couldn't be
| much else doing it, if no COMMAND.COM has been loaded (of course..who
| knows..).
| I should mention that this started with an *apparent* CMOS
failure--a
| little strange since I just replaced it with a new Li cell just a year
and a
| month ago. Nothing very strange seemed to have happened to it, except
all
| the drives (floppies, too) had been lost, and this was on the first
boot of
| the day.
| I reset the boot order for it to boot A: first (had been C: then
A and
| was able then to boot to DOS from the startup disk, but could not see
the
| other drives (just A. I had previously installed an old version
(4.0) of
| Partition Magic and used the PM recovery disk to find out that the
| partitions were all still there--but this version doesn't do anything
for
| MBRs, apparently.
| In short, the EOS byte could easily be missing, AFAIK, and the
only
| thing I can see at the moment is to use Debug to see if it's still
there.
| Clearly, I would welcome any thoughts on the subject before I try
| anything. I'm a little leery of slaving the disk to my other machine,
if I
| don't know for sure what caused the problem.
|
| Thanks for your time,
| Joe
| "PCR" wrote in message
| ...
| Enter "FDISK /MBR"
| This will rewrite the code portion of the Master Boot Record,
| leaving the Partition Table untouched, except it may muss the
partition
| table, if there is a missing End-Of-Sector marker (55AA), per
| http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=149877
| Boot Record Signature AA55 Not Found
|
| Here are the warnings against it...
|
| (a) If you have a boot sector virus, you may lose access to all
| partitions. Then
| http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html MBRWork "might" help
to
| recover them.
|
| (b) If you have "overlay" code in the MBR, e.g., EZ-BIOS, Maxblast,
a
| boot manager, then that will need to be reestablished afterwards.
| http://www.aefdisk.com/ FDISK & Boot Manager
| http://support.microsoft.com/support.../Q245/1/62.ASP
Overlay
| Utility & FDISK
|
| (c) FDISK may be buggy. So? Use MBRWork to do it, or
| http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q263044
| Latest FDISK, hoping this one doesn't have any bugs. (But it doesn't
| solve the 55AA thing.)
|
| (d) If for some reason the "geometry" setting in BIOS does not match
the
| hard drive, then any write to the drive may be destructive. So, go
into
| BIOS and have it "automatically detect" the proper setting. (If you
can
| DIR the drive in DOS, then you have proven the geometry is right.
Well,
| Blanton says even that may not be true.)
|
|
| --
| Thanks or Good Luck,
| There may be humor in this post, and,
| Naturally, you will not sue,
| should things get worse after this,
| PCR
|
| "jt3" wrote in message
| ...
| | I think I recall reading someone posting that the /MBR switch
on
| FDISK
| | not only rewrites the master boot record, but also wipes out
partition
| table
| | data, so that if you use /MBR on a disk with multiple partitions
on
| it, you
| | lose the partition data. Is this true?
| | I have a problem with a corrupted MBR (I think) and my old
version
| of
| | Partition Magic doesn't do the MBR, apparently.
| | Thanks for your time, as always,
| | Joe
| |
| |
|
|
|
|