god i hate fixing other people's pcs...

[bustone]

im trying to fix a computer that has windows XP and 98 both installed (when you boot up it asks you to choose your OS). you cant get into either of them. the person is looking for me to completely reformat the computer. i tried putting in the XP cd and starting the comp, says press any key to go into xp setup... but it just freezes. im not very familiar with recovery type procedures cause i've never really messed my pc up. any suggestions?

 

[flood]

mess up your computer by overclocking or some other method
then you will be familiar with recovery procedures :-]

 

[osage]

make sure the first boot device in the bios is set to floppy, and boot to a Win98 boot floppy. wait till it loads all the tools and then change the dir to the CD rom drive with the Win98 disk, setup.exe.

I haven't used XP to any degee, so no help for you there..but at least you should be able to get intoWin98

 

[hoihtah]

nice suggestion flood.

as for bustone... who might be still looking for an answer...
when you are trying to get help from someone who is not there to physically assess the situation...
then you have to list out full spec. & senario.

first off... i'm assuming that you can go through the POST.
and you're getting as far as to load up xp loader.

see if you can place in a win 98 cd and boot off from it .
try to install it... and see if same thing happens.

if the person asks you to reformat the hard drive...
and it's okay for him/her to lose everything...
then i think it's best that you do that.

and make sure after you install win xp...
especially if it's not your computer... creat a ghost image of the harddrive...
so that you won't be called upon everytime something goes wrong and they want you to reinstall.

 

[bustone]

i tried that osage, told me the 98 boot disk was invalid and to remove.
god i hate this

 

[osage]

Can you boot with the win98 floppy and run Fdisk.exe ? or will it just not recognize the floppy at all ?

 

[Skibby9]

no doubt, flood!

Nothing like hosing your fiance's pc (gift from her father to her) while she's out of town to teach you to fix a pc/reinstall windows.

Bustone--- try looking here for a working boot disk http://www.bootdisk.com.

I personally use the CD-Rom God at refomat time. You can find it at http://www.pangsit.com/misc/utilities.htm. Works every time.

 

[zigCorsair]

I would guess those links would rule and fix whatever problem, but a HD vendor disk might be good for reformatting too. It might only get you to Fat32, but you could change that by reformatting during XP install too.

 

[CTho9305]

definitely mess up your PC a few times - you'lll learn a lot.

anyway:
do they want both OS'es back on? if not:
1. boot a win98 bootdisk
2. fdisk, delete all partitions
3. create TWO partitoins. one for data, one for windows + apps.
4. boot from OS install CD. install to one partitoin
5. reinstall programs ON THE SAME PARTITOIN as windows. since they depend on the registry, if windows breaks, they get broken too, so putting them on a different partitoin is of no use.

if they want both OSes: never dual-booted two versions windows in my life. I would guess
partition 1: win98
2: xp
3: apps
4: data
but I dont know how you isntall under two different OSes.

 

[rockhard]

If you can get a Dos prompt with the CDrom drive accesible via a boot disk from somewhere just type E:\i386 (return), winnt (return).
This will start the XP 16 bit installer which is compatible with DOS for you.
When you get to the Partitioning mullarky nuke all partitions and just select to install to empty space.
When you get asked where Win98 is just give them a lame excuse as to why the two wont install together to prevent mishaps in the future and give yourself an easier time in the support department

 

[Aquinas]

I notice that a lot of people recommend putting the OS on one partition and the applications on another. I disagree with this. This might be fine if you were then going to lock down the OS partition with NTFS to restrict users from messing stuff up, but in my experience this is generally a bad idea when installing OS's for people who are not really computer literate. Most of the time I find that these people still manage to fill up the OS partition because they forget to change the location of installs...

I would suggest that you get a good boot disk. I use magic boot disk. I can't find the link, but I can email it to you if you would like. Then if the computer was dual booting fine, I would reformat both partitions. This is will make sure that at least their computer is closer to how it was before they gave it to you. Then reboot off Win 98 CD and install. Then once that is going install XP on the other partition.

Feel free to AOL or email if you have questions that I may be able to help you with. (salluce@charter.net) (AIM: DeltaSierra)