Help! Help!

[AnneGuida]

Hi,

I have an old Win95 PC with 48MB of RAM. I was working last night to upgrade it for my dad. He really wanted to install W2K on it so that he could run a program that requires it.

So, instead of installing Win98, I tried installing W2K Pro. What a disaster! Now all my PC does is say:

OS is loading....

a disk read error occured.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart

I've tried a few things to revive it (boot from disk, CD-ROM) but nothing works.

The PC starts up as usual, detects the Maxtor HD, but takes a dive after that.

Thanks for your help.

Anne:(

[Midknyte]

48MB of RAM? You really shouldn't be running win2k on a system with less than 64MB, and even that is gonna be really slow.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/professional/evaluation/sysreqs/default.asp

did you do a clean install or an upgrade?

[slam]

did you check bios settings for boot from floppy is enabled.

[AnneGuida]

Thanks for your replies.

I did an upgrade. I know that 48MB is really too little, however, I thought I would chance it.

I checked the BIOS and boot sequence to see what it was and what was enabled. Okay there.

Is it hopeless?

Anne:eek:

[Midknyte]

upgrades frequently fail. you can try a clean install by booting from the cd, but it would run really really slow. I think you should have stuck to win9x. Too late now.

[AnneGuida]

I know. I gambled and I lost.

But now, how can I resurrect my computer?

Is the old Win95 lost forever and the contents of the HD?

There must be some procedure to get out of this mess.

:rolleyes:

[rusty4x4]

It sounds dire, and I confess I haven't faced something like your situation before. But in your place, I would go for broke and try the following:

1. Go into the BIOS and change the order of booting to floppy, then CD-ROM, then HD, in that order.

2. Try to boot from a DOS floppy. See if you can access C: from there. If you can, you have a chance of partitioning and reformatting the HD, if you decide to give up on it.

3. If 2 does not work, OR if you don't want to give up on your data, see if you can mount the old drive as a slave in a newer machine. Maybe the new machine will see the data on the old drive. You'll need to change the jumper on the old hard drive from either Cable Select (CS) or Master (MA or M) to Slave (SL).

4. If 3 does not work, then there must be some data recovery pros out there who may be able to help. OR, you could fill the drive with zeros, repartition, and reformat, and bid adieu to the data. The latter can be done with a utility from Maxtor.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/index.htm

I would wait on others to chime in on my so-called advice before following it. There are pretty smart admins and users here who probably have a better idea of what to do.

Good luck, and hope this helps.

[crossedup]

If your going to try rustys ideas and the thing has reformatted as ntfs you will need this.

http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm

How far did you get in the upgrade before this happened?

:t