HELP!!!

[scottish144]

I have a 7 year old Sony Laptop that has run fine until today. It runs Win98. I did a windows scandisk, waited several hours, and everything seemed fine. Scandisk said it needed to reboot the system. I hit cancel and tested everything. Seemed fine. I reboot via start menu, and the Sony VAIO thing pops up, followed by "Operating System Not Found". Do I need to reinstall Windows or what? I tried booting off the OS CD via a pci-slot CD drive, but the CD was a burned copy of the original. Would that make any difference? Please help.

 

[bearxor]

try removing and reseating the hard drive.

if that doesn't work, try booting off the cd and see if io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com are in the root of the c drive. You will likely have to do a 'attrib -s -h *.*' to view those files. If they are not there, copy them from somewhere. If that does not work, come back and let us know. At that point, you may need to reinstall.

 

[scottish144]

It won't boot off the OS CD. Period. I went into the BIOS and the CD Drive is first on the bootup list, followed by the HD. After that, I rebooted, and somehow it loaded the Win98 Screen (Win98 Logo with fading bar at bottom). However, it got stuck there and wouldn't open the desktop. I rebooted again and got "File Sector can not write drive C" and had a choice of Abort, Retry, or Fail. Abort rebooted, Retry didn't work, and Fail killed it. I then got a recovery disk and managed to open DOS via the disk. It started with "A:\". When I typed C:\, it said "Invalid disk designation".

 

[bearxor]

looks like it could be either the hard drive or the ide controller. I'd go with bad hard drive first.

 

[scottish144]

@#$%! Thx though.