Roger;
I suspect a pack-bell of this vintage may have  hard drive overlay software
installed.
As in possible cause 2. "Third party disk partitioning software"
Also do check for a boot sector virus in Dos. I use a norton emergency disk
or F-prot anti-virus on a floppy.
Try booting from "Ez drive" (or the current incarnation "data lifeguard")
from western digital or "max blast" from maxtor.
you can download these from www.westerndigital.com or www.maxtor.com
You will have to have access to another computer with internet access.
Or you may have a friend with the a kicking around, most retail hard drives
come with a overlay disk.
By booting with this software on a floppy,  your hard drive should be
recognized and you may be able
to restore the overlay boot partition on it.
It doesn't  often work for me, I usually just reformat and  reinstall, but
you will lose all the data on the drive.
This is the main reason I prefer not to use overlay proggies as they can
screw things up and lose your data.
But some older machines don't recognize larger hard drives, so I still
ocassionally am forced to use them.
You might consider up-grading your ram to at least 32 mb as windows 95 is
reported to need around 12 mb just
to run it alone.

     |
  --|---------------------------
     | ><>  Larry  Fisk   <><
     |      Fisk Computers
     |      Fruitvale, Idaho

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Cooke" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 6:08 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Packard Bell hard drive trouble


> I have a Packard Bell 133mhz,8mb Ram,1.3Gig Hard drive. Running
PhoenixBios 4.04 and windows 95. Not sure which version of 95. WHen I boot
it without a boot disk it gives a message (operating system not found).I
have tried the 95 boot disk and get a message (non-sytem disk or disk error
.Replace disk and strike any key when ready.)Then I tried a 98 boot
disk.With the 98 boot disk ,I can get to the start menu.I tried both
options,with and without cd-support.It says trying to start windows this
might take a few minutes.Then it gives a message (drive c does not contain a
valid fat or fat32 partition).

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