I have an IBM Thinkpad 390E, I installed ArkLinux (ew..), and then wiped the hard drive. Now, when I slip in my Win98 (original) CD, it starts working nicely and such, but it only finds one drive - my CD rom drive. I'm positive my hard drive is still in working order. It tries to install windows to the CD, which doesn't work out well. When running a DOS floppy I ran fdisk, and it too only found my CD rom drive. It freezes up in the listing, only showing the cd drive.....

Somethings wrong Maybe somebody else has had similar experiances?

Try booting with the floppy, get to the command prompt.

run fdisk - its a disk partioning utility

c:\>fdisk <enter>

It you haven't used it before do a search on to find a tutorial but basically the drive is likely entirely partioned as a file system for linux. with fdisk you'll be able to remove all those partions. It will likely come up as 'unknown' with ms dos. after they're all deleted, create new ms dos partitions.

you could at this point create 1 partition (entire drive is one letter) or multiple drives. either way you need to mark the c drive as active or master something like that. you'll see it.

you may have to reboot after this. restart again with the floppy and format the new partition(s) with :

c:\> format c: /s

the /s will copy the command files to the c drive and allow you to boot to it.


only the c drive requires the switch.

lastly you might have to also run

fdisk /mbr

this will replace the master boot record to remove lilo or whatever boot loader was used.

I would suggest getting the Windows boot disks (www.microsoft.com) and reforamtting with them, then install Windows.

Like I said, I've tried fdisk before, but it freezes up on the display of my disks (cd rom, hard drives).

I'll try again though,



-kanzure

Boot up using a Windows 98 boot disk and go to a DOS prompt. Then key in

fdisk /mbr

This will write a new Master Boot Record to your hard drive and (hopefully) fix your problem.

Ed Almos