Can anyone help?

sandisk

Hi there, I don't know if I can be helped out here or not but it's worth a shot if I can save the pc.

Basically my Mam was using her windows 98 pc for just the likes of mailing and simple things like that.

I don't live at home but I was in my mams recently and tried to use the pc.

It was full of error msgs and kept saying " this machine has caused an illegal operation and must close".

She's only on dial up so I burned some anti-virus to both verbatim dvd and cd, the likes of xoftspy, spybot and so on.

The disc's wouldn't load up in the drive.

I think my niece was at the pc and messed up all the system folders but I didn't know if it was the pc that wouldn't load up the disc or the rom drive was gone??

So I said fuc* it, I'll re-format because there is nothing important on the pc.

So it's a windows 98... I went out and bought empty floppys, went back to the pc, went to the add/remove programs to make a boot disk because I have windows 98 se AND windows 2k burned to seperate verbatim discs.

I put in the floppy and hit "create disk", it starts and I think brilliant!!

It gets to 20% and cuts out. Same thing happens after a few tries and I've been trying to sort this pc out for days so I'm totally pis*ed off.

I re-format the pc WITHOUT the bootdisk.

Now the pc loads up but when I put any version of windows in the rom drive nothing happens.

I have a pc now without windows on it.

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to put any version of windows back on this pc?

I havn't a clue from here.

If it was the rom drive that was gone in the first place, well now even if I get a new rom drive, there is no windows on the system to load up the rom drive software??

Any help on this would be much appreiciated.

Thansk

sandisk

KdjaCL

Download a bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com make a bootdisk on your PC from one of the images provided i used to use Win98Se Custom without ramdrive

Assuming you have a win 98 cd boot to C:/ (with the bootdisk) and run setup from there.

Or if the Win98 disk is bootable make the PC boot from CDrom drive with the 98 disk in it and let setup run that way.



kdjac

Diddy Kong

You could try here, they have a load of boot disks.

edit...ahhh beaten to it

Ruu_Old

The boot sequence should be set to CD ROM to load first, you can set that in the BIOS menu (DEL, F2 or other key when computer boots up). Then the setup CD should load.

edit: or what they said, faster.

Diddy Kong

Ruu...dont know if that would help...most Win2K CD's arent bootable...hence the bootdisks, same i think with the Win98 ones, on that note you should actually set it to boot from the floppy so the bootdisk can do its job.

Ruu_Old

Ah hadn't thought of that, sorreh.

irishpartyboy

I've never used a Win2k CD that wasn't bootable, and Ive used plenty. So best bet try boot and install Win2k. Win9x sucks eggs anyway.

Diddy Kong

Dont know if its your cup of tea, but if the machine is only being used for a bit of browsing and mail, you could try Linux...

sandisk

Sorry I forgot to mention that I got a mate of mine that has a floppy drive to download windows 98 se bootdisk from bootdisk.com, but when I put it in the floppy drive it says "invalid system disk. please insert system disk".

I do remember pressing the del button to enter settings but I don't remember the bios settings popping up.

I'll be in my mams tomorrow so I'll bring a windows 98 cd with me, hit the del button, what should I look for on the screen then?

Even without the bootdisk, should the windows 98/2k still load up ?

If this doesn't work, is the pc dead?

Thanks for the replys and help

Sandisk