On 17 Feb 99, at 12:35, Dreamer's Den wrote:

> Now, now, don't laugh too loud.
>
> I was given an old 286 with a 40 mb Hard Drive. I would like to
> get the critter running well enough that my kids can use it for
> homework (basic word processing) when dad needs his computer to do
> his own work.
>
> I can boot to the C: drive and see the directory (dir/w) without a
> problem. I can run other programs that are on the hard drive and
> in other directories. The previous owner had lotus, windows 3.1,
> a couple of games, and some misc other software installed.
>
> However, if I change to the "windows" directory (win 3.1) and then
> try to view the directory the following errror message pops up.
> "general failure reading drive C: abort, retry, fail?"
>
> This error message pops up every time in the "WINDOWS" directory
> only. Any ideas?

  Have you tried CHKDSK /F?


> There is nothing I need on the hard drive right now. So wiping the
> slate clean is a feasible idea if someone can supply step by step
> instructions. I have the disks for dos 6 and win 3.1. I am just not
> sure wether they are still good. Do I need to reformat first? If so
> how do I do it? I have seen warnings about formatting a hard drive on
> this list in the past few weeks and don't want to kill a potentially
> useful computer.

  The warnings that you have seen will have been about *low-level*
formatting of *IDE* drives.  This 40 MB beast is almost certainly MFM
or RLL, and the low-level format code in the drive controller's ROM
should work just fine.[*]
  But it's not clear that a low-level format is even called for.  The
high-level format done by the FORMAT command is probably more than
sufficient.

[*] This is invoked from within DEBUG -- which you might not have a
copy of -- by an incantation that looks rather like "g=c800:5".

David G

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