Lost Hard Drive

I had a problem and had to reformat my c: drive, which is the only hard drive on the system. Its an old EPS 166MZ machine. I used a startup floppy to reformat it. After the formatting was done I put the Win 95 CD in the cd drive and tried to install Windows. I cannot get the computer to access the hard drive! Fdisk, startup disk etc do not recgonize it. Any suggestions?

 

Hopefully you've got it fixed by now (I noticed you posted a few days ago), but in case you haven't:

Check the CMOS settings to see if the drive is listed there correctly. Might even have the system do an auto-detect on the drive.

If the drive can't be found by the CMOS, double check the hard drive cable connections.

Edit:

Is this a SCSI or IDE drive?

 

Is Windows 95 First Edition involved in this?

 

Yes.

 

IDE drive and cmos finds it

 

Try booting from a Win98 boot disk. If you normally see a message similar to "Press CTRL to boot from floppy ", wait for that message and follow the prompts to boot from a floppy disk.

Then run Fdisk and let us know if fdisk can see the drive, what partitions are on the drive (size and type), total drive size, amount used etc.

 

Partition - C: 1
Status - A
Type - PRI DOS
Volume Label - (none)
MBYTES - 1225
System - UNKNOWN
Usage - 100%

 

That's looking good - fdisk is showing a 1.2GB partition with all of the available space being used and the partition is active (bootable after formating).

But, the listing for "System - UNKNOWN" means the format didn't take for some reason. That entry should read either FAT16 or FAT32, depending on how the drive was partitioned (Large Disk Support enabled or disabled). So, you'll need to format it again.

A Win98 boot disk can be used to format the drive prior to installing Win95. Boot from the Win98 boot disk choosing without CD-ROM support and format with the FORMAT C: command. Reboot from the Win98 boot disk after the format completes, choose to boot with CD-ROM support. Watch to see which drive letter is assigned to the CD-ROM drive - it should get drive letter E:. Then start the Win95 setup as you normally would:

E:
SETUP

 

THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!