Join or sign in Register for your free TechRepublic membership or if you are already a member, sign in using your preferred method below. Use Your Email Use FacebookUse Linkedin

My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

Locked

Im not too experienecd withthis thing NT ing enerally so your going to have to dumb it down a bit – unless its like Win95 cos im good at that. My uncle gave me a PC cos being 15 I dont have enuff cash to get my own. Its slow and old but works just fine for writing up my homework. It came with Windows NT and Windows95 already on it and I have been using it sucsessfully for several years now. I haven’t touched NT too much as I just prefer the normal Win9.X and so have been selecting Win95 at thedual boot optin screen all the time. Yesterday I got the following error message BOOT: Couldn’t find NTLDR please insert another disk. Win95 I cannot see any NT files as my Win95 is FAT16 and dosent recognise the NT FAT32. This is not important as Icannot boot either OS. I tried boothing Win95 from a floppy and that did not work. I really need your help to get back into my PC as all my coursework is in there and I need it urgently. Its an old box and this error came out of the blue after many yrs of use – i have a scsi card inside but only to run the CD-Rw. There is a 233AMD chip inside aswell as 128mb memory.

Topic

My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

In reply to My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

The Master Boot Record may be corrupt,insert the Windows 95 startup disk in floppy drive,boot computer and when startup screen apears,press designated key to enter BIOS setup,locate the order of boot drives and change the order to boot from the floppy first,exit and save changes
Reboot computer,the floppy should engage,if so at the comand prompt type Fdisk /mbr,reboot computer enter the bios setup and change the boot sequence back to the hard drive first in order.
Insert floppy and reboot,if the command prompt comes up type sys c:
this will transfer the system files to the hard drive,which should enable you to boot computer noramally

My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

In reply to My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

Thanks for that – tired it but it didnt work – any more ideas people?

My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

In reply to My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

Get ahold of a win98 boot disk. If you can’t get at the files you are looking for with that, then you have NTFS versus FAT16 or FAT32. If it is in NTFS, install some flavor of NT (NT4, Win2K, WINXP) right over the top of your other OS. You shouldthen be able to access all the same data. Then, if they are text documents, I would just copy them to floppies, then reformat your hard drive. Make sure you use fat16 or fat32 to format your drive if you are using multiple operating systems, as you are probably learning from this experience. If you are going to use Windows 95, make sure it is Windows 95b or OSR-2, which should support FAT32. There is also a program you can download that lets you use fat32 in NT4. Win2K and XP work fine with FAT32.

My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

In reply to My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

Still nothing but i did some rooting around using partiton majic and I have some new info. The FAT tables seem to be corrupted and when in DOS the WINDOWS and WINNT folders are not there. They have been replaced with some funny looking symbols – that you cannot type. I there for cannot open these folders -which I assume are NT4 and windows95. Any ideas for recvoering the FAT tables and/orcorrupted folder names? Thanks

My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

In reply to My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

It sounds like you were hit with a virus. If you can get ahold of a Norton 2000-2003 cd (which is bootable) and use the system built in to scan for the virus. You may have to jump out to a DOS prompt and run the “NAVDX.EXE” file on the cd. Type “NAVDX /h” to get a list of options. The options to look for are the ones dealing with automatic cleaning, which can be almost necessary when a large number of files are infected. First try the cd’s automated way of scanning. If no viruses are found, I’d say your hard drive just crapped out on you. It sounds like your data is crucial, so I’d get ahold of Norton Utilities and run “Norton Disk Doctor”. This should re-build the FAT tables if necessary. But first make sure you virus scan. It will make it much harder to disinfect the more things you do with moving files around.

Reply To: My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

In reply to My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

The question was auto-closed by TechRepublic

Reply To: My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

In reply to My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

The question was auto-closed by TechRepublic

Reply To: My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

In reply to My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

This question was auto-closed because it is 90 days old

Reply To: My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

In reply to My dual boot Win95/NT4 system went bust

This question was auto-closed because it is 90 days old

[Author]

Replies