missing operateing system

When I try to boot the computer, The comact screen comes up , but than it goes to a black screen, missing operating files.

I tried my windows 98 disk, but it dosn't seem like it see's the cd.

Any idea's?

Thank you for your time
Eileen

 

Hi Eileen

First, welcome to the Board!

I am going to asssume that by comact you mean Compaq...if this is true try the following...

When the red Compaq letters appear on your monitor, push the "F10 " key which should take you to bios...

In the first menu that appears you should see a selection for "restore defaults" ..highlite that and hit enter, you should then be prompted again to press F10 to confirm your choice...

Let us know if that at least allows the system to see your CD rom..

Cheers
Jake

 

Hi,
it is a compaq.

It didn't come up with the prompt to restore defaults.

It will not even go into safe mode.

Any ideas

Thanks
Eileen

 

Were you able to get into your bios as in cmos setup? There is a difference between F10 key Bios entry and the F8 key Windows bootup options.

How to get into cmos:
http://members.cox.net/joemurphy/setup.htm

While in your bios check on the statis of your hardrive. Is it recognized and reflecting the correct size (heads, cylinders, sectors and mode etc).
=============
Since I'm here and I have a premonition that this is going to wind up needing a win98 emergency bootdisk, do you have one? If not you can get one here:
http://bootdisk.com/

Notes^^There are other sublinks on many subjects in the above site (Bootdisk.com) that you may find most helpful also. You may wish to check out a few while your there. Make special note of the "Bios Guide" link.

My previous links should help you to familiarize yourself with some of the bios functions. Be careful in there, while generally anything you do can be canceled out on an option to exit without saving, there's a potential for big time bloopers in there. I don't want to scare you but I don't want you to be careless either.

After checking that the harddrive is correctly identified. Make sure your boot sequence is correct also. For the time being you want it set to boot to the A: drive first, cdrom second and hard drive c: third. C: must be in the boot sequence.
If the bios default reset does not help..
Get that win98 bootdisk and try it out. See if you can get to the A: prompt or, hopefully, the c: prompt, Will wait for an update on your progress....

 

Eileen

One thing I forgot about, many Compaq's first offer a lanquage selection menu before you ever see the menu I mentioned in the previous post...

Also, when the red Compaq logo appears, you will first see a small blinking cursor in the upper left corner of the screen which should after several seconds move to the upper right corner of the screen....that is correct time to push the F10 key...

If you get that far, Goddez1 did an excellent job of guidance on next steps in the previous post....

Cheers
Jake

 

Hi

I did the f10. It allowed me to reset settings. Didn't seem to do any good.

I went into bootdisk.com and didn't see an emergencey disk, so I tried 2 differant boot disk's. It came up with not a valid system disk.

Even with out a disk it now says not a valid system disk.

I think the computer is as confused as I am..


Please help

Eileen

 

You need to set the boot sequence in BIOS. It can be changed around so that it boots to the A: drive first, that's when you use a boot disk.

If you can get it to boot to the floppy drive (A:\) you'll have a black screen with just the A:\ > prompt. Once you get there, assuming you use a Windows 98 boot disk, type SYS C: and hit enter. Then take the bootdisk out and reboot the system.

 

Good Morning,

I think we are making progress.

I set the bios to boot to the A: drive first.

I got to the black screen with the A: when I typed in SYS c: it said invalid function.

I was able to get to a screen to start windows. when I did it with out cd it said
Drive c does not contain a valid FAT or FAT 32 partition.

When I did it with the cd in it said

If you have HPES or NTES installed on your hard drive you will need to create an MS_DOS boot partition to set up windows.

What do I try next?

Thanks
EIleen

 

Hi Eileen

You are right, you have made progress...congratulations!

As to what happens next, depends a great deal on you and if you are comfortable with the basic's of setting up hard drives and dealing with Dos commands ..

The good news is, your computer knows drive C: is there and connected ..

The bad news is, it has no clue as to what, if anything, was ever written to it....

Your choices are pretty much confined to two...unless it is discovered you need a new hard drive...

A: try and recover what was there ...
B: wipe the slate clean and attempt to start over..

either way, we'll be glad to help ...let us know?

Cheers
Jake

 

Hi,

I barrowed another boot disk and windowa 98 cd. When I start the computer it see's the boot disk now, it gets to a point were it says it is going to restart computer, but doesn't. it thinks for a few seconds and goes to an A prompt. If I types in setup it says checking system registry. But never goes past this point.

I'm not sure if the computer is seeing the cd. The light says yellow instead of green.

As far as recovery, I don't care about what was in there, we can start with a clean slate.



Thanks

Eileen

 

Here is how to use fdisk and format to ready the HD for Win98.
At A:\> type fdisk enter
press "Y" enter for large disk support
at FDISK Option select "1" enter
at Create DOS Partition or logical DOS Drive select "1" enter
Verifying drive integrity, **%
press "Y" enter at do you wish to use the maximum available size for Primary DOS Partition
and make the partition active (Y/N)..?
If you want to partition the disk set the size of your primary.
Verifying drive integrity, **%
you then get a message to RESTART your system for changes to take effect.
YOU MUST REBOOT and format AFTER FDISK.

Press Esc and then Ctrl,Alt,Del, with bootdisk/Startup disk still in the floppy drive
At windows Startup Menu select with CD-Rom support
at A:\> type format c: (this will only format the HDD)
At WARNING, ALL DATA WILL BE LOST PRESS "Y "
Formatting and the size of your HDD (i.e. 19,09.84M for a 20Gig)
after format enter a name for the HDD or just press enter you can name it later
Install windows.