Ian,

This may not be related to your post but an incident happened to me on a
similar equipment.

I ran into a similar skull-scratching puzzle of installing an HP Lazerjet
2200 last week.  I had gazillion things going in my mind when one of the
systems I was working on, after a normal reboot,  went through Windows smart
hardware installation asking for the HP 2200 driver.  Unknowingly, I plugged
in the HP CD on the drive and let Windows 'extract' the driver .  I remember
the harddrive whinning and grinding as it processed the information from the
CD drive.  That mistake caused me to reformat an 80 Gig HD.  I have no
explanation for it but for some reasons that driver 'installation' screwed
up the customer's WinMe in a similar fashion you described!   Of course I
know... you run the HP driver CD from the drive and let HP's 'autorun' load
the program.  After completing the program installation, you then let
Windows configure the printer set up automatically on the next boot up.
Well, that in-attention to details on my part sure ruined my weekend.  Have
a good one, mate!

Emie DelRosario


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ian" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 8:12 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] W98 - repairing a Partition Table and Master Boot Record


Further to my earlier posts about this, I believe now that the culprit was
the driver disk for the Hewlett Packard 2210 printer.  Somehow, it was
managing to screw up the system to the extent that it was losing contact
with the C drive.

Anyone else run across this problem?

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
[log in to unmask]


"Interesting development in the PC that lost it's C drive.  I got it going
again, as I detailed earlier, but when I returned to the customer's house,
and tried again to install his new HP 2210 printer, the same thing happened!

I put in the HP driver disk, and began the install again and again it locked
up.  Then, on reboot, C drive had disappeared again.

However, after a few restarts, I did manage to resurrect the system."

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