HELP!!! PC Won't boot up!!! :-(

[Peck14]

Hello,
I just got a new P3 450 PC, and I gave away my old P166mmx to my cousin. When I went to my cousin's to hook up the PC, I went ahead and tried to reinstall Win95, since that's what he wanted me to do. For some reason though, I couldn't reinstall Win95, cause when I insterted the CD and restarted the computer, nothing would happen, it would just lock up. Anyway, I took a break to go eat lunch, and when I got back, my dumbass cousin, who is just now learning about computers but thinks he knows everything, somehow deleted the DOS Partition on the Hard-drive os somethin' like that. Anyway, here's my prob. The PC won't boot up, and I never made a bootable floppy disk for my old PC. Is it possible to make a boot disk from my new PC and use it for my old one, or am I screwed? Also, how do I make a working boot disk? What files does it need? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.
Thanks,
Andrew

[C.C.]

Andrew,

If you have windows installed on your new system, all you have to do is go to install/add new hardware(under control panel) and go to start up disk. This should make the boot disk you need. As far as the old system goes, I'm formatt the hd and start from new. Hope this helps. C.C.

[Butchk]

Goto to www.bootdisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com) and you should beable to download a W95 startup disk.This should help I hope.

[This message has been edited by Butchk (edited 10-23-1999).]

[deep_sky]

if you are running 95 on the new one then you should be able to make a boot disk using the add/remove program option. alternately got to the bootdisk website.
also, give your cousin a list of things that they should never do the computer such as deleting the windows directory, messing around with fdisk, dumping the bios, things like that =-)

[Axel]

Just to add a bit of humor - I know of someone in IBM server support who wanted to "neaten up her system" so she put all the *.dll's in one folder, all her *.exe's in one folder, and so on - she wondered why her system stopped working shortly afterwards. Where do they find them? and why do they hire them? - Who knows??? Chances are your relative will be in system support in a few months......

[Dillbert2000]

I hate to say this but ignor C.C.s reply unless you are using Win 95 on your new system. (VERY UNLIKELY) Windows 95 uses a 16 FAT and Windows 98 (all but the very early ones that don't support large disk drives - above 2 Meg) use a 32 bit FAT. That means that the FDisk and etc. are not interchangeable. Your Cousin actually was doing the right thing if he was trying to go from a Win 98 System to a Win 95 system. (That is the reason that when you put in the Win 95 disk it "just locked up". Maybe you should give your cousin a bit more credit.)The first thing that you have to do is reset the disk to a 16 bit format. The fact that you didn't have a Win 95 boot disk would have driven you nuts anyway. you can't use the FDISK or any other part of the Win 98 startup disk for Win 95.

If I were you I would explain to your cousin that he is in all likelyhood going to loose hard disk space by being in the Win 95 OS.

As to the other posts Butch is probably giving you option #1 for getting your Win 95 Boot disk. Come on guys, who sells a New 450 PC with Windows 95?

Good luck.

[This message has been edited by Dillbert2000 (edited 10-26-1999).]

[This message has been edited by Dillbert2000 (edited 10-26-1999).]

[This message has been edited by Dillbert2000 (edited 10-26-1999).]

[Dillbert2000]

Part 2
Listen to Butch and get the Win 95 Start up disk.

Run FDisk from the Win 95 start up disk and creat a primary Dos Partition (a 16 bit format for Win 95) But it won't be more than 2 Meg no matter how big the disk truely is.

Unsing the Win 95 Disk format C.

Now install Win 95. Yea let him whine and moan about how small the disk is now. But hey you told him.

Good luck.

[This message has been edited by Dillbert2000 (edited 10-26-1999).]

[Bob-NB]

Dillbert2000 wrote

Windows 95 uses a 16 FAT and Windows 98 (all but the very early ones that don't support large disk drives - above 2 Meg) use a 32 bit FAT.

The win95 information is not totally correct.

Only win95a is fat16 exclusively. Win95b and the last version win95c offer the option to use either fat16 of fat32. (It asks the question "do you want to enable large disk support?" during fdisk.)

If it does so, you have one of the later versions of win95, and you can fdisk to a larger that 2gig size.

Regardless of which os you have, you should use a bootdisk that is compatable with your win95 os. All are available at www.bootdisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com) as mentioned earlier.

Then proceed with your fdisk and formatting of the hard drive.

Good luck. Re-post and let us all know how things worked out.

[This message has been edited by Bob-NB (edited 10-27-1999).]