Hi,

My hard drive crashed finally, lol. I posted a few weeks back and everyone warned of disaster but I carried on.

Problem now is that I bought a new 80gig drive and put it as master but it won't let me format it. I tried going into bios and changing things. I need someone to help me troubleshoot here. If you can help me, please go on AOL MESSENGER
moshemarc

and help me troubleshoot.

when I go to a: after booting on floppy and do fdisk, it says no fixed disks present.
I am suprised my hard drive didn't come with instalation disk like my last one.

What is the brand name of your disk drive. Maxtor.com has a good installation utility that I think works on most drives.

talk to me on aim :) - IgnoPotent

er, nm, re-read the post

tried troubleshooting with IgnoPotent, still having trouble, please help!

when I go to a: after booting on floppy and do fdisk, it says no fixed disks present.
I am suprised my hard drive didn't come with instalation disk like my last one.Seems like more companies are sending hard drives that are not bootable -- which is the cause of your problems.

Insert your boot disk and type: format c: /s -- presuming you only have one hard drive. After the format is done you will have access to 'fdisk' and can partition accordingly.

tried format, doesn't work

Do you have your bios set with hardcoded drive info?

When the computer boots it should show the progress of autodetecting the harddrives/cd roms and if you don't see it then either the cable is on wrong or your jumpers are set wrong or something else.

Double triple check your harddrive cable, your jumpers, if there's no slave harddrive either set your drive as "Master no slave" or "Cable select".

Make sure your drive is on the end of the cable, new ata100's are picky about being on the proper cable connector.

If fdisk don't see it no drive utility is likely to either.

how do I know if its the drive, bios or me
jumper is set right, no cables are on same line but I am not sure its on the end of the cable. should i give it its own computer tower case too?

ok, now I got it to format as the drive needed to be set to auto in the bios but I can't seem to load operating system. It loads command.com to c: but when I do setup it doesn't load anything else. why

What are you trying to install?

Most OS nowadays - you just stick the CD in and reboot and the box will boot from the CD either automatically or it will say like "Press any key to boot from the CD..."

So stick the CD in the drive (whatever OS it is) and go into the BIOS and make sure that the first boot device is the CDROM drive. Assuming that the CD is bootable - you should be either directed automatically (or hit one key) to a setup screen.

If you CD isn't bootable - then make sure the floppy drive is the first boot device just in case. Then boot it up with a floppy. Linux boot disks will have their own menu thing going but windows boot disks will just lead you to C:/

If you're trying to install Windows and the CD doesn't boot from the drive, then you need to go into {DRIVE LETTER}:/I386/ and run setup.exe (i think it's setup.exe - I forget :p)

Good luck

I do setup and it doesn't work, now it is telling me to make a ms-dos partition to setup windows. How do I do that from dos?

Did you create a primary partition with fdisk?

I just created one with fdisk, set it as active, then I formated and then I restarted and put in setup.exe

what did I get, coping files needed for windows setup

but doesn't load cd to load full windows or anything

cd rom drives are working though

THE CPU WAS BAD. WE MANAGED TO LOAD WINDOWS WITH A BORROWED CPU AND THEN TOOK IT OUT ONCE IT WAS LOADED. I WILL NOW BEGIN MY SEARCH FOR A NEW COMPUTER!