Can't see my C drive from boot disk

Open the Control Panel and double-click the Add/Remove Programs Icon and click on the start up tab,create a start up disk and then follow through with the FDISK
Cold boot the system with the startup disk in drive A:
At the command prompt
a:fdisk

Pls. verify if you do not use any disk manager to boot your harddisk, if so pls. used the disk manager software to erase the data.

make sure that you are booting to the floppy

You need more than MSCDEX.EXE for CD-ROM support. You need a .SYS driver in your config.sys, the statement would look something like this depending on the name of the driver:

device=a:\cdrom.sys /d:mscd001

The /d: parameter specifies the device name, and must match the device name specified by mscdex. You may already have a DOS driver on the machine's hard drive. Copy it to the floppy and add it to the config.sys. I can get you a driver if necessary. As for not being able to access C:, I attempted to look up NEC Ready information from NEC but their site appears to be down. Your motherboard may not support a 2 GB hard drive if it's old, but I doubt that's the problem. More likely, if you have Win95b the drive is formatted FAT32 and the floppy has an earlier flavor or Win95 which can't read it. Boot into Windows and, from a DOS prompt, type "sys a:" to transfer the correct system files. You may also wish to copy the proper sys.exe, format.com, and fdisk.exe to the floppy.

If after all this you still can't get the CD-ROM to work, you could always copy the Win95 folder from the CD to the hard drive, then reboot in MS-DOS mode and type:

smartdrv
deltree windows
deltree progra~1
deltree mydocu~1

(also deltree any other folders on the drive. I don't recommend doing a "deltree \" because it might make the system hang up)

cd\win95
setup

Your nec would uses necide.sys
This should be on your harddrive already.
You want to make sure you copy it to your boot floppy.

I would suspect that there's some sort of way this thing is formatted that's preventing you from seeing it. I would wonder if the rescue floppy was designed for dos 5.x, 6.x of whatever version is originally came with. The same thing happens when you boot a machine with NTFS on it with a windows bootdisk.

I would fist make a brand new boot disk. You can go into the add/remove programs in the control panel and there's a tab in there to specifically do this. ONe thing you will want to copy though is the mscdex file from the windows command file. This is a file necessary to run your cd-rom from dos.

Before you fdisk and reformat, you would probobly want to have some CD-Drivers available abd working with the bootdisk. If you cango www.windrivers.com, there's a univrsal driver that seems to work with most of the CD-Roms out there. Pretty easy to setup.

Once you're done there, just boot with that and run fdisk. The options in there may still not recognize the disk, however, it should still recognize the fixed disk. At this point you can delete your partitions. They may show up as a non-dos or non-windows partition, so you may have to use that options to delete the partition.

You can also use the same utilityto recreate a new partition. Once this is done your can format the HD the same way you would a floppy, except you would designate c: instead of A:

Good luck to you

Mark

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