HELP !

[SLF 999]

For all you gurus out there can you please help either check the sanity of this or suggest another way of doing this.

scenario - win 2000 (corrupt) pc that I want to get back to win 98, tried to boot from a win 98 startup disk (I know this startup disk works) in the floppy and wouldnt boot, after much swearing, took hard drive out of the pc and into mine and reformated it (via control panel , not in DOS) put disk back into other pc and tried to reboot from the startup again , still no joy.

Whats going wrong????? Is it due to win 2000 using NTFS and not FAT ?

Proposed solution - I was going to put hard drive back into my pc and try to boot up , reformat the hard drive as FAT and install win 98 that way then just reinstall it in the original pc and let win98 sort out the missing and new devices, or would I be better using a 'virgin' hard drive ?

All comments (yes I know I was stupid even starting this, but hindsight is a great thing) welcome.
Thanks

[stickyb]

If a machine won't boot from a floppy, then the first thing I would suspect is the floppy, not the hard drive, no matter how corrupt.
Eliminate the floppy disc itself by trying to use it to boot up another pc

If that works, suspect the floppy drive on the original machine (maybe compatability problem?) or the bios settings.

When you try to boot, does the floppy whir away, or does the drive light flash on the hard drive as if it is trying to load from there?

Watch out for bios settings that control the order of boot, you may need to move the floppy to the top of the list in this situation.

[This message has been edited by stickyb (edited 17 April 2001).]

[SLF 999]

Took your advice, and got the system rebuilt last night, after creating a 2Mb DOS partition on the hard drive and reformatting from NTFS to FAT, then WIN98 went on no problem.
Thanks again

[mutt]

SLF 999,

Did you also try the Windows 2000 startup disk?

Mutt