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Can't start Windows 95

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9 replies

by mbaker

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I do some small computer jobs for a
school district and I have encountered a
problem I have never seen before.
Someone tried to compress the C: drive
in Windows 95. Now the computer
cannot boot into Windows. The C: drive is
now 300MB and a new G: drive appears
to have all of the correct window files. I
ran Norton Utilities and NU seems to
think the C: drive is not a hard drive. I
tried to do a windows recovery and I can't
do it without formatting C:. The computer
was left to run disk compression over
night. It is connected to a Novell Network.
The machine is an IBM Aptiva. Does
anyone have a suggestions? Thanks

9 replies

by emcs

I have a fix but it is too large to put in this space. I will e-mail you the fix.

Good luck

dennie

by calves

If this is a network machine and does not have anything important storage in it, I would the right thing. Instead of fixing it (it seems to me, this will never be fixed right), I would rebuild it, only this time I would use a Win98 boot disk, to take advantage of the enhanced Fdisk and set the disk to support FAT32 (If you need instructions email me), and I would take out the option to compress the drive. It slows down the machine considerably and the gain in space is relatively small.
If the machine has a lot of files in it, and you need to back it up, install a second disk and copy the files over to the backup disk b4 re-installing the OS.

Good luck!

by alan.robinson14

The system file should be on the new G drive
Get a start up disk and "sys.com"
Boot from floppy
A:\sys g:
Oh, you'll have to copy the Sys.com onto the A.

All the Windows directories ought to be on the C:

In my experience over many years compression is great. It infact improves speed due to a caching improvment "More data is read than before. It may slow doen only if you have a very slow CPU and a very fast Hard Disk.

Alan

by asjwm2

Dear baker,
The first thing I think of when I see
"Aptiva" is: talk to IBM, which is a little
more difficult than talking to Microsoft,
about on a par with getting hold of HP. My
friend has an Aptiva, and to fix it required
contact with IBM, which is best done by
phone. Disk Compression should be under
Accessories/System tools. Perhaps you can
uncompress C drive onto some floppies or CDs,
then wipe the hard drive with fdisk and
reinstall 95, then reload the data. I would
get a dos prompt and look at the partitions
with fdisk. Think about it before executing
anything. There are a number of parameters
to fdisk, one of which is fdisk /mbr (master
boot record). You can probably make a
different partition active with fdisk, then
backup everything and reinstall. Look at
"mybackup.com."
Careful now !! Johnny

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