Boot to Error Message

Appreciate some assistance.

Have a friend who decided to delete some 'stuff'. Whatever he deleted brought about the following:

When PC starts to boot, an error message appears on the black screen as follows:

Not ready reading drive B:
Abort, Fail, or Retry.

Current drive no longer valid>Install


The PC was running W98 (do not know if FE or SE)

There was no drive 'B' on the PC.!!!!!!

The drives are:
A:\, C:\, D:\ ('Compaq partition'), and E:\ (CD-ROM)

Is there a way to get back to Windows again?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

FZWG,

I tried a search on Microsoft and Google, but didn't find much. One thing that did come up a couple times was the floppy cable. Did your friend have the cover off or add/replace anything recently? You may want to have him check the cable connection. Make sure that it is secure and correctly connected.

I assume that you have tried all the options; Abort, Fail, Retry; with no luck. If you could get into your setup utility, you could check the drive configuration to make sure everything is correct.

Mike

 

Thanks for the reply.

Will check drive configuration.

These folks would not (like no way!!) open up the PC and work inside the case. Did ask them, though.

Might be BIOS setting got changed somehow.

 

Your BIOS idea sounds promising. Check for a floppy swap settting (it switches A to B and vice versa) and check the boot sequence.

 

Well, as it turns out, the BIOS on this PC amount to very little.

The FDD is set correctly to A:|.
There is no option to set the boot order.

At C:\dir /p the return is: 0 dir

Guess Windows is gone from this partition.
Now trying to check out if the Compaq 'D' partition was wiped out also.

 

At least it's cleaned out, right?

These days everyone is a computer expert just like all men used to be mechanics.