Old school IBM aptiva i need help.. its cursed

[SidewaysN2second]

I swear that satan forged this system in hellfire himself... ok here goes

its an old school p200 tower, the hard drive is 3.2 gigs, and the plan was to wipe out all the partitions, and do a clean install of win98se (system has win 95 on it right now

Anyway a friend told me to use Fdisk, and delete everything, then make a new dos partiton, then reformat the drive...


welll what happens is the now, it says the filetype is unknown, and when i try to format it, it says invalid media type...

so after getting severely pissed off, i bring it to my place, and in win2k, i format it in win2k (left click, and format) and i made sure i set it to fat 32...

anyway all appears well, i bring it back to his place, install it , get it goin start the windows install, and then disaster... windows cant install because there is something to do with NTFS in the way... and we cant format the hard drive! format c:/ just wont work!

any ideas how i can get him back up and running?

Im determined to format the drive in my machine again, and install win 98 on it and then put it back in his machine...


any ideas on what i can do? please guys, clear instructions, im a bit of an idiot

 

[SexEPid]

I helped what I could here!
I am also an idiot, so it isn't saying much

5 hours spent on this!

Pid

 

[MrHappyMonkey]

hmm... dunno if this will help, but try this:

boot with a boot disc if the drive is already formmated. Do a switch your A(A drive and type the format command (format c. It should allow you to format the drive becuase it is reading the floppy disk while executing the format command. I think I had that exact Aptiva model at one time too!

 

[SidewaysN2second]

i think we tried that a few times, we are using the win98SE boot disk too... but i will definitely keep it in mind for tomorrow

 

[Mattster]

If you want to completely wipe the drive, there is a utility on IBM's website called Wipe, which will totally clean off the first 8GB of a hard drive.

Linkified

Hope this helps.....
Matt

 

[SidewaysN2second]

well last night what i did after all that mess wa sbring the hard drive here, and from win2k, i dropped back into win 98... I formated the drive from inside win 98, and no problems, i could use it, etc...

then i dropped to dos from win 98 and i was able to format it from dos again, whoppie

then i unhook all my other hard drives, take my win 98 se, startup disk, and set his hdd up as my master booted of the disk, and when i went format c: she was ready and willing!

is it not plausable to believe that once i take it back to my froends place tonight and re install it, that i should then be able to put on win98se without any problems? like i said, when windows install began, just as it was about to begin writing to the HDD was when it gave me a message saying windows cannot write to the hard disk, yadda yadda, and then something about NTFS or some other file system may be the problem...

 

[TheMagician]

<< is it not plausable to believe that once i take it back to my froends place tonight and re install it, that i should then be able to put on win98se without any problems? >>



You can always hope, but I had an IBM Aptiva before and had nothing but problems installing anything other than their butchered version of win95. I've never had problems installing/upgrading/updating on a PC I built, but that Aptiva (still have it) gives me nothing but problems.

Goodluck

 

[SidewaysN2second]

lol... well... if worst comes to worst, I'll install the damn OS here, and then transplant it back into the IBM!

 

[azkiwi]

There was a similar discussion on a different thread. I 'think' the cause is that, as shipped, Aptiva puts some files in a separate partition. When it boots it looks to this partition ( in the BIOS?) first and then to your windows installation.
I had a Compaq lappy like this. If you reformat and wipe the IBM partition you might have your way. I think this is how they can get away with giving you less than a full OS when you buy, and why they always reboot no matter how bad you bollox the OS. Don't quote me on this, but its one direction to look in.

I've had mixed results with proprietary drive utiltities (like Ontrack Disk Manager)- they do the job fine but come back to conflict with an upgrade somewhere down the road. Just use the DOS format command.