windows 98 installation

phried · Post by **phried** » Thu Jun 20, 2002 11:25 am

hopefully someone has encountered this before.......i'm working on an old system for some lady - it's a Win 95 system, one 1.5 GB and one 2GB hard drive, a tape backup , a CD, and floppy. it's a P1 system, 16 MB RAM, you get the idea - OLD. i think i messed up and need a way to fix it. i booted off my Win 98 floppy and fdisk'd. i deleted primary partition, created again, but forgot to 'set active partition' before i rebooted. now when i boot the system, it won't boot from floppy or CD, no matter how many ways i configure the boot sequence in the BIOS. it's an AOpen MB, btw. is there a way for me to format this drive then install Windows? as many times as i have trried to get this thing to boot, it still says 'no operating system present' every time i boot.

nexus_7 · Post by **nexus_7** » Thu Jun 20, 2002 11:33 am

can U have the other HD boot first and then get into the fdisk that way?

your best bet would be to jsut removed the HD pop it in another system With windows and format it in windows. Worth a shot atleast. Thats all I can think of.

Greg

phried · Post by **phried** » Thu Jun 20, 2002 11:56 am

yeah i think i'll just put it in my system and format from there...just checking. thanks

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Jun 21, 2002 9:08 am

Something else is wrong. There's no way that forgetting to set the Active Partition will prevent it from booting from a floppy. Many old P-1 systems, however, don't boot from the CD.

As Nexus said you can pop it into another computer and fdisk and set it up in there, but I'd also check the old system carefully for loose wires, etc.

Old systems are notorious for getting corrosion on the ribbon cables. All you need to do is pull ALL the ribbons and re-install them - this scrapes the pins on the ribbon connectors clean.

Keep an eye out for old brittle ribbons. You might have a break in one. Get yourself a spare set of cables.

Hope this helps...