Help!! Partition, drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter R. L.
  • Start date Start date
Hi there, I am fixing a friend's Winme pc.
Yet, it seems that the disk is corrupted (it had two
partition, but now it doesn't boot). I used a clean boot disk
to boot up the system but the system does not see the hard
dirve anymore. My question is that is there any freeware tool
I can use to solve this problem?

Do I need to re-partition the drive? My friend told me that
he does not have any important things in the disk so anything
can be wipe off. However, my problem is that if the system
cannot see the drive, I can do neither reformat nor reinstall.
Is there any freeware tool out there I can use for this?

On a seperate note, will running an XP installion work?

Thank you!!!
Click to expand...


You need to be a bit more specific. When you say the system
does not see the HD, are you getting this info from the boot
screen? If so, that may mean the OS or the HD is corrupted.

Go into the BIOS setup to see if the BIOS sees the HD. If
it does not, make sure the auto detect is selected and try
to boot again. If you cannot make the BIOS see the HD, you
have a hardware problem that may be as simple as a loose
cable, or a catastrophic as a bad power supply, a bad MOBO
or a bad HD.

If the BIOS has the HD shown, boot the machine from a WIN9x
or ME emergency boot disk that includes the MSDOS utility
FDISK. Issue the command "fdisk /mbr" without the quotes
which should rebuild the master boot record without data
loss if it exist in any form. If the HD does not then show
up for work, you will need to run the FDisk utility to
repartition the drive. After the drive is partitioned, you
can run the Format command on each partition before
installing Windows ME if that is what you choose. If you
choose to install, Win XP, boot it from the CD and follow
the instructions. If you have an upgrade version of XP, it
will require that you insert your original ME CD at some
point. The XP install can setup it's own installation
partition. Once that is done, you can add additional
partitions from inside XP providing you did not use the
entire HD when you made your XP partition setup parameters.

You can find the proper syntax for the FDISK and FORMAT
commands online

http://www.computerhope.com/fdiskhlp.htm

http://www.computerhope.com/formathl.htm

An index to most MS-DOS commands can be found here

http://www.computerhope.com/msdos.htm#02
 
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