I think ive got it narrowed down, Please Read

alright, i figured out the reason i couldnt boot windows from the startupdisk is because the msdos.sys files is pretty much empty on the startupdisk(duh *slaps head*) anyways i swoped it witht he one on my hard drive and was able to boot to windows, (im actually typing this from my pc woo hoo!!) only thing is it creates the ramdrive and is as laggay as hell

ok so this is what i think is wrong, i still cant boot when i set it to bood from HDD, give me the same Load Error message, now i noticed this when i was doing some things in dos earlier, and just now when i went to install something and instead of it defaulting to install in C: it defaulted to F:, drive f doesnt exist btw

this all started when i was trying to copy filesf rom another harddrive back when and it gave me an error and then froze and after rebooting it started giving me that load error messagee

so im thinking that it thinks that drive F: is the default drive and when it goes to boot it doesnt find it hence the imidate load error message, so my whestion is this, how and where can i cahnge this? i vaiguly remember it being in some file but it was so long ago i dont remember where to even start looking, if anyone knows, pleassseee help!

thanks!
~Dave

 

ive just gotten an error message in windows along the line of "themporary drive C: could not be fond" also while trying to install norton system works it said that it could not be installed on a a tomporary folder "Systemworrk cannot be installed to a folder that is designated a temporary folfeer in windows system properties"

maybee that will help to figure out whats up

 

Help & Help

I really think its time to Format your hard drive(s) and start from a squeaky clean situation. Leastways, that is what I would now do in your situation. Before you do that (it's not all that drastic) switch off the power, take the cover off the computer and make sure that the RAM chips are nicely snuggled in (wriggle them) , that there is no dust/tangly/cowebby things anywhere - if there is remove carefully - put the cover back on and Format.
Reinstall the OS and all t'other programs
Then again I will bow to the gurus on this site if they can extract you from where you are at the moment. For me "Format Format"!
Best Regards and Sympathy - I hope you succeed
Robert

 

ive just formated this not to long ago loosing verything i have workes so hard to get, and ive just managed to get a bunch of it back which isnt easy over 56k so neeless to say il use this crappy bootdisk run thing as long as i have too

plus formatting is not good for ur hard drive physically, the more u format the more ur risk bad sectors]

plus theres gotta be a solution to this, *waits for one of the guru's to show*

 

Did you have the other hard drive's jumper set to slave, and was it connected to the middle connector on IDE 0, and was the partition on it non-Active (there can only be one Active partition normally, and it seems to me that you need a multi-boot manager if you're going to try to boot a machine with two HDs each of which has an Active partition and a bootable system on it).

I've never had or seen the problem you're having, so I haven't jumped in to offer help, just to explore possible explanations for the failure to boot.

 

of course its set to slave, ive had it working properly for the longest time, but then around the time my computer died the first time the second partition on it stopped showing up and instead it would onlyshow one partition and boot my cdrom off, and then i plugged her back in to get some backed up things off of it and when it was nearly done coppying i got some error and the whole thing crashed and never started up again, regardless that HDD isnt currently connected so it makes little difference

the problem seems to be that my computer is looking for a different drive as the default other then c: and c: has been marked as a temporary drive although i have no idea where these options are assuming the even exist like norton claims they do

judging from where i get the errror, right when windows should be booting theres gotta be some file, like the first one it reads thats pointing it to the wrong drive

 

Try booting off a Win98 floppy and doing FDISK/MBR at the a: prompt and then rebooting off HDD

 

come on someone's gotta know

 

come on, please, someone, i need to fix this, surely some of you computer gurus must have an idea