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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

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.

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.

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

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