[jezzaharri]

I have a Dell Latitude L400 that has/had Windows 2000 on it. However it now get as far as the Windows 2000 startup screen - with a linear timer moving from left to right - and then freezes (with the timer about 3/4 of the way across). If I hit F8 during start up it eventually ended up at a stop screen - about four lines of small size text saying something along the lines of "if you haven't seen this screen before restart; if you have run virus check and .... " As nothing I did would get me to a dos prompt I plugged in my floppy drive and started it up from a windows 98 boot disk. That told me that C: wasn't partitioned and that as it was big I should run FDISK to do that. Happy to load Win 98 to get it going I did that. FDISK on C took about 10 seconds - which suprised me as when I have done this on my main machine it takes ages.

Now the C: (well actually it seem now to be D drive after resarting again!) just has MS-RAMDRIVE

2,091,008 bytes total disk space
603,136 bytes in 15 user files
1,487,872 bytes available on disk

1,024 bytes in each allocation unit
2,042 total allocation units on disk
1,453 available allocation units on disk

655,360 total bytes memory
627,664 bytes free

I don't seem to be able to find my hard drive! has it failed? I don't know what to do next. I have borrowed a CD ROM drive from work - the machine is a hand-me-down from work - but can't run that at the same time as the floppy and can't even work out how to get it to open (DELL LATITIUDE C-SERIES 24X CD-ROM MODULE)

Any ideas?

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ms-ramdrive uses part of your ram to simulate a hard drive, so it isn't a physical drive at all. It's used by the emergency boot floppy to operate the machine and load the files. What may have happened is that you have two partitions on the HDD, a small C: and a larger partition. I would remove all partitions with fdisk, install a new one, then format the drive and reinstall win98.

Edited by Tyger, 14 October 2005 - 02:37 PM.

[Tyger]

ms-ramdrive uses part of your ram to simulate a hard drive, so it isn't a physical drive at all. It's used by the emergency boot floppy to operate the machine and load the files. What may have happened is that you have two partitions on the HDD, a small C: and a larger partition. I would remove all partitions with fdisk, install a new one, then format the drive and reinstall win98.

Edited by Tyger, 14 October 2005 - 02:37 PM.