[cash433]

got my hands on a computer running windows 98. The problem is that it won't boot. It had a boot virus. A friend told me to fdisk and reformat, but it won't format. This is what happens: I start it with startup floppy and windows 98 cd in, it goes to windows 98 setup. I click enter to start setup and it says, hard disk drive c is not formatted, so I try to format drive, it says windows files cannot be installed because the format of drive c is incompatible with windows 98. It says I can have setup reformat drive c and so I say ok..Then it says setup cannot install windows 98 on your computer and error was detected while formatting you primary hard disk partition. Does anybody have any ideas as how to help me? Or is the hard drive bad and maybe I need to trash it. When I first started working on it it would not do anything except give me a disk error. It would not even try to load windows. At leaste now it has gotten to trying to load the os. Just won't do it.

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Boot the PC and keep tapping the F8 key until you get options, type format c: then press enter, type Y to confirm then press enter

That is if 98 is still on there in some form

Otherwise, you are probably not booting from the CD ROM Drive and need to boot the PC and keep tapping the delete key until you enter set up where you need to change the boot order to CD ROM then hard drive, press F10 to save and exit, type Y to confirm, make sure the 98 CD is in the ROM Drive, press enter and it will reboot, look for load from CD

You will not need the floppy, so remove it

[Retired Tech]

Boot the PC and keep tapping the F8 key until you get options, type format c: then press enter, type Y to confirm then press enter

That is if 98 is still on there in some form

Otherwise, you are probably not booting from the CD ROM Drive and need to boot the PC and keep tapping the delete key until you enter set up where you need to change the boot order to CD ROM then hard drive, press F10 to save and exit, type Y to confirm, make sure the 98 CD is in the ROM Drive, press enter and it will reboot, look for load from CD

You will not need the floppy, so remove it

[Tyger]

Normally scandisk will repair some boot sector errors and you can run it from a floppy boot disk. It's possible your machine has NT or Linux on it which win98 will have trouble with. I got a real museum piece that had win95 installed over WfW installed over ms-dos 6.22 with a compressed file system and neither fdisk nor format would touch it. I ended up having to write the drive to zeros before I could use fdisk and format from 6.22, and reinstall and then install WfW.

[cash433]

Thanks, but that didn't work either. Went to set up and load from cdrom. Had to format before I could load os. Still won't format says Invalid media track 0 bad- disk unusable. Guess I will take it out and replace it. But before I do I will try to write the drive to zeros. Thanks......... All help is greatly appreciated.

[Murray S.]

Howdy:

Try going to the hdd manufacturers website and getting their disk overlay utility.. Not the best way to go, but it may do the trick..

Murray

[cash433]

Can anyone tell me how to write the drive to zero's? Have tried and nothing seems to work. So guess I must still be doing something wrong. Thanks.

[Retired Tech]

Have a look at killdisk here

http://www.killdisk....ownloadfree.htm

Active@ KillDisk - Hard Drive Eraser is powerful and compact DOS software that allows you to destroy all data on hard and floppy drives completely, excluding any possibility of future recovery of deleted files and folders. It's a hard drive and partition eraser utility.

Active@ KillDisk conforms to US Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DoD 5220.22-M. The most secure Gutmann's data destruction method is also implemented. You can be sure that once you clean up with Active@ KillDisk, sensitive information is purged out forever.

This is security software for unrecoverable data elimination for any computer capable of booting in DOS mode from floppy drive. It uses access to the drive’s data on a physical level via BIOS bypassing logical drive structure organization, thus it does not matter what operating systems and file systems located on the machine. It can work with DOS, Windows 95 / 98, Windows NT / 2000 / XP, Linux, Unix for PC.

From here

http://www.killdisk.com/