My friend has Compaq Deskpro 2000 M166 with windows95.
She tried to install windows 2000 and during the installation she recieved an error and she canceled the installation. Ever since, she received error after errors.
I formated the disk and partitioned and I tried to install windows 98. It was going OK up to 78% when the an error message popped up asking to press R to retry. I did this time after time but to no avail. I had no choice but to cancel the installation and redo everything from the start.
I restart PC and when i want to boot from hard disk i recieve an error Non-system disk or disk error-Replace and strike any key when ready.
When i chose to boot up from CD it loads CD and i recieve A:\ prompt.
On A:\ prompt even though there is no floppy inside, when i type DIR i recieve all sort of files. I have no clue where are these file coming from since I intentionally remove the floppy disk from drive A. There are about 19 files and some of them files are :
ASPI2DOS SYS, ASPI4DOS SYS, AUTOEXEC BAT, COMMAND COM,FDISK EXE,EXTRACT EXE,CONFIG SYS etc.
Now when i insert the floppy disk and type DIR I recieve the same files that i recieve without a floppy.
When i type FDISK, again, with or without floppy disk I recieve "NO FIXED DISK PRESENT".
It is all the same when i use either bootup disk or even my startup disk of windows98se -NO FIXED DISK PRESENT.
In another words I cannot access bios on hard disk.
When i try to setup from D:\ win98 CD it says "Cannot create a temporary directory.
If you have HPFS or NTFS on your hard drive, you will need to create an MS-DOS boot partition to set up windows.
On C:\ prompt i see this "Volume in drive C is MS RAMDRIVE"
C:\DIR i can see these 15 files:
ATTRIB EXE, CHKDSK EXE, COMMAND COM, DEBUG EXE, EDIT COM, EXT EXE,EXTRACT EXE, FORMAT COM, HELP,MSCDEX EXE,SYS COM etc.
I tried to format C: and it wont support formating c::
I know my English is not good and maybe all this sounds very confusing but i wrote everything i tried so far and I hope there is someone who can understand what i wrote first and, then what and where the problem is
Knowing that you always help us, may i thank you in advance for your time and efforts.
Kind regards
Flamur

I can certanly understand some of this and I will explain why you can see files on the floppy disk even when the disk is removed.

When you start the PC from a Windows 98 Startup Disk or "boot disk", it allows you to access quite a lot of files that are actually too big to fit on a floppy disk. The way that it does this is that it compresses most of those files into the Ebd.cab file, just like Winzip compresses files into ZIP files.

To allow you to access those files, it has to extract them somewhere. As you are installing Windows, it has to assume that your hard disk will be wiped and, therefore, it can't extract the files to your hard disk.

So what it does is it uses a section of your computer's memory (RAM) to create a "RAMdrive". It assign the RAMdrive the next available drive letter after your hard disk and this is usually the D: drive. However, if it can't read your hard disk, it will assign the RAMdrive as drive C.

To keep things simple for the user, Windows pretends that the files are actually being accessed from the floppy drive rather than trying to explain to you what a RAMdrive is. Therefore, when you do a DIR listing on drive A:, it pretends that it's reading files from the floppy drive whereas, in fact, it is actually reading files from the 2Mb RAMdrive. That's why you can still read the files when you take the floppy disk out.

That's also why you cannot format the C: drive - it's actually not part of the hard disk.

I believe that the reason that you are having problems now seeing the hard disk is because the Windows 2000 installation wiped the Windows 98 partitions and set them up as NTFS (which Windows 98 cannot read).

There may be some clever tool that you can download off of the Internet to repair this problem but, as far as I know, the only way you can fix it now is to put the hard drive into a Windows 2000 or XP computer and delete all of the partitions so that it is completely empty. You can then put the hard drive back into the original PC and re-partition it with the FDISK utility from a Windows 98 boot disk.

Hi DJNafey,
I just want to update you with a progress of this problem.
I bought another hard drive(westerndigital 120gb) and installed on my computer and i tried to do exactly what you told me but to no avail.
I put my hard disk as primary and my friend's as slave but it won't recognise at all. I dowloaded PC Inspector hoping to access the other hard drive but again to no avail.
I believe this hard drive already had its days and there is nothing I can do to revive. I will advice my friend to buy another one and hopefully it will get her computer running once again.
Also I would like to apologise for the delay of this reply but I didn't have access to internet for awhile. Reason being is that few days ago while trying to remove a program which Hijacked my PC, it totally wiped my OS from my PC. I had to wait for my new hard disk to arrive in order to recover my files on my old disk. Now i have a new hard disk, installed PC Inspector and I recovered all my files from my old hard disk(even though it was formated).
I only wish i knew about this PC Inspector earlier
Anyway, thanks again for your advice and your time.
Kind regards
Flamur

No problem Flamur

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