Here I go again - replying to my own posts:--))
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.
Back to the workshop again and this time I replaced the 40wire ribbon on the CD drive (an AOpen 52x running on the secondary IDE port as master) with an 80wire. The mobo is a Gigabyte 7VKMP.
(I'd previously experimented with enabling and disabling DMA on this drive but it didn't appear to have any adverse effect, either way)
This seemed to improve the data transfer from the CD to HDD but it still seems a little flaky. Anyone else had this sort of problem?
TX
Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
[log in to unmask]
----- Original Message -----
From: Ian
Subject: [PCSOFT] W98 - repairing a Partition Table and Master Boot Record
This is a FWIW, as it might be of help to someone who's just lost their C drive, as happened to me yesterday on a client's machine.
I'd gone to his place to help him install a new printer. The 7-month old, W98SE, 2Ghz, 256ram machine booted up OK (for the first time that day) but when I threw in the Hewlett Packard CD to begin the printer installation, it locked up.
I was forced to switch off and reboot. But after the pc re-started, C had disappeared. Boot sector virus? Who knows. The antivirus program was outdated, so I guess it's possible.
I tried all the usual things, like opening the case and checking the leads and jumpers, but still no C. The BIOS could see it OK but there was no sign of it in DOS. I reset the BIOS to defaults - no change.
As a last resort (every authoritative reference on the net will tell you NOT to do this, and why), I ran FDisk with the command 'fdisk /mbr', but that didn't work either.
I brought the machine back to my shop and attempted to overlay W98 with XP, by booting from the XP CD and trying to do an upgrade, but that didn't work either, it kept stalling.
Finally, as I was about to reformat the drive and start over, I got on the net and found this site:
http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/index.html
Daniel (the Starman) has assembled a mountain of readable information about Partition Tables and Master Boot Records, plus links to download some very handy tools, and I found one that fixed my problem.
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