On Feb 20, 10:05 pm, John Dulak wrote:
DJW wrote:
John,
The CD is I regular ms windows 98 installer CD. Winbook talks about a
restore CD probably made by or for them with there name and model on
it however this laptop cam with the OEM windows 98 disk and a CD with
various drivers on it and give instruction at
http://www.winbookcorp.com/_technote/WBTA07120138.htm

Well sys C: did not work I got a cannot specify default drive
response. Was I to do it at the A:\ prompt or type in on a blank line
as in C:\ sys C: ? I tried it all different ways with no luck. And
do caps or spaces mattered?
Two things I did not mention above was when this problem first
happened after the computer got unplugged during startup there was
some mention on the screen of a D partition on the hard drive, which I
did not have. I only had one partition on it being C drive. I did
something in response to that, don't remember and then of course did
not get into windows at all for the first time.
I have gone back and now have the exact wording I get when it tries to
boot up. It says .. windows 98 has detected that drive C does not
contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition. May I have done something with
the only partition on the hard drive when I thought I was being asked
about the second partition that I never had on the drive?
I see that above I got my answer as to when to use the sys C: command
that indeed I do it at the A prompt.
And above as far as slipping the HD out and putting it into another
laptop to do the install. I have no access to another laptop and if I
get a used CD-Rom drive on ebay then in the future I finally got an
optical drive back up and working in this old laptop. About the same
effort to remove the HD for a temporary swap or remove and replace the
DVD with a CD_ROM.

DJW:

It sounds to me as if the file system on your hard drive has become
corrupted to the point that it is no longer usable. (Not unuseual
since you had a power failure while boting.) The fact that it is
still identified correctly by the BIOS indicates that the drive is
physically and electrically OK but it needs to be re-partitioned,
formatted and Windows 98 re-installed. You mentioned in a previous
post that you had no data files you absolutely had to recover from the
hard drive so this seems to be your best approach.

DO YOU HAVE THE PRODUCT KEY TO INSTALL WINDOWS (25 CHARACTERS!)?

The windows 98 boot floppy should have the DOS FDISK and FORMAT
programs on them that should let you salvage the drive.

- Boot from the floppy.

- At the A:\ prompt type FDISK Enter and the FDISK partitioning
program will start. Depending on the size of the hard disk you may be
asked if you want to enable large disk support. Answer YES.

- Choose option 3 "Delete partition or logical DOS Drive" and folow
the prompts to delete the corrupted primary partition at "C:".

- Create a new active primary partition. The defaults should be fine
for you.

- After you are finished with FDISK exit to the A:\ prompt and
*reboot* the computer.

- When the computer reboots to the A:\ prompt format the partition
using the command "format c: /s" Enter. (The "/s" copies the boot
files to the HDD). You might want to use the boot floppy to run
SCANDISK on the C: drive just to be sure it is OK. (scandisk c: Enter)

At this point the computer should boot without the floppy and get you
to a DOS "C:" prompt. Your task now is to get the contents of the
Windows 98 CD available to the computer. You can either install a new
CD drive and use the CD directly (You will have to use the boot floppy
with CD drivers to have access to the new CD drive from DOS.) or use
another computer to copy the CD to a flash drive and use the technique
I described in a previous post to get access to the flash drive from a
DOS floppy.

Many people when installing Windows copy the contents of the CD to a
folder on the HDD to speed things up and have them available after
installation. The only thing you REALLY need to copy from the CD is
the contents of the "Win98" folder. A common location on the HDD for
these files is C:\windows\options\cabs. you can create these folders
from a DOS prompt as follows:

md c:\windows
md c:\windows\options
md c:\windows\options\cabs

If the CD is drive D: the command to copy the required files from the
CD to the HDD would be:

copy d:\win98\*.* c:\windows\options\cabs

After the copy is complete change to the cabs folder;

cd c:\windows\options\cabs

and run setup.

setup enter

This will start the Windows installation program. From here you just
follow the prompts, choose the components you want to install, enter
the product key and you should be in business.

HTH & GL

John

--
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'' Madness takes its toll - Please have exact change. ''

John Dulak - Gnomeway Services -http://tinyurl.com/2qs6o6

John and everyone thanks for all the help now all i am doing is
waiting for the CD-Rom I got on ebay yesterday to get here. If I have
any more software problems I will repost to this thread.