primary master hard disk fail

I've gotten into a little mess.

Have a formally working computer with Win 98 on it configured with

IDE 1 - 4 GB hd, 6 GB hd
IDE 2 - cd/rw, 4 GB hd

These 3 hd's had been partitioned as C-G with C-E partitions on the primary (boot) disk.

Wanting to do a clean install of Win ME I booted with a W98 startup disk and ran fdisk which wouldn't let me delete the existing partitions. So I rebooted with an XP cd and used XP setup to delete the existing partitions and create three new ones C-E, one per hd.

Then rebooted with the W98 startup disk, went into fdisk and deleted those three partitions since they were all NTFS. Then tried to create a primary partition on the first disk but when it got the "checking for disk integrity" part it just hung.

Since then rebooting gives me the "primary master hard disk fail" message - whether I am trying to boot from the W98 startup or a cdrom. I change the BIOS appropriately before each attempt but whatever mess I've caused seems to override this.

So now what?

Marty

 

Use a win98 startup disk to boot to DOS and run fdisk (type:
fdisk
at the A:> prompt. You can select each disk and partition it (every disk needs at least 1 partition). Then go ahead and install windows by booting to the CD (ctrl-alt-del).

I can't believe it won't let you delete partitions!

 

Right you are; although I did try that before posting (why I posted) it works now.

The difference's gotta be that I had the box turned off in the interim. I've heard about clearing out RAM but this is the first time have actually seen that make a difference. At least I'm assuming that's what the problem was.

Marty

 

Persistance pays.
Good luck!