Strange I/O Error

[ShreddedWheat]

I'm putting together some old computers. I'm testing the harddrives (anywhere from 1 gig to 13 gigs) I used Seagate Seatools for DOS to test them and everything is ok but the program doesn't format the drives. The bios recognizes the drives but when I use a win98/me boot disk( to format the hd) it comes up with a disk I/O boot error and says to remove disk and press any key. I do that and nothing same message. I can format the drives if I use a WinNT install disk but don't want to install WinNT. What gives?

 

[sieistganzfett]

from my memory i am going to say everything i did in those days.., you need to first use fdisk to create a partition, then you can do a format on it. i guess the error is when you switch to C: which is the hard drive from the A: which is the boot disk you used. once your at the A: and it goes through the prompts for the ram drive, switch to the ramdrive letter and use fdisk to delete the partitions on the HD, then create a partion how ever you want with all the available space using the fdisk. when you exit you will need to reboot, then you can from the A: prompt do a format c:

 

[ShreddedWheat]

The strange thing is that I can't even get to a prompt. When I set the floppy as first in the bios and reboot, the computer shows that it found the bootdisk as OK then it says "I/O Error" replace disk and press any key? I have used the bootdisk before and it was fine.

Thanks

 

[sieistganzfett]

oh, floppy disks go bad all the time. you can try reformatting it as a bootdisk, try again, or tyr a different floppy. if 2 disks that work in another pc dont work on that computer, it can be either the floppy disk drive or the cable being bad. if any of these ancient computers allow booting from a cd, make a cd that is a bootdisk for w98. you can use that to fdisk and format. and a cd is a lot quicker too. another option you have is pulling the HD out and putting it into a running pc, format it as fat32, and copy IO.SYS.MSDOS.SYS,COMMAND.COM to it to make it a bootable drive, and also copy the win98 folder so you can install windows 98 on it (95 and me are the same setup, its all in a folder, just copy it to the HD to install using the setup under the folder)