finding harddrive in dos ?

honegod

honegod

[H]F Junkie
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I am trying, with wild UNsucess so far, to install SOME operating system on little sisters new computer.

using her old harddrives.

the first one I wanted to use just refuses to let 98 OR xp install.

so I want to see what she has on my second choice.

I can, eventually, get dos running from floppies, and get an A:\ prompt.

I can dir the current floppy, but C, D, E, F, AND \:\ ,\\:\ ,\\\:\ give me invalid drive or no longer valid ??

the harddrive is recognised in the bios, partition magic shows 2 partitions, a primary and an extended with logical formatted in fat32 with lots of content.

is the fat32 my problem in dir-ing the partitions ????????

obviously I am NOT a dos fiend :rolleyes:
 
Be careful with FDisk though. Are the hard drives formatted with NTFS (You mentioned XP). If so, then dos won't be able to read it at all.
 
If you have partition magic, have you tried blasting the existing partitions and installing 98/XP after that?



...or you could just download Knoppix and not even bother installing on the HDD ;)
 
fdisk will not do anything without entering w and then quitting
to reformat just do fdisk /dev/hda
d
1
d
2
...
w
q
 
Originally posted by FrothyByte
check the partitions with 'fdisk'.
Click to expand...

the problems with that are :
1 none of the floppies on hand have fdisk on them, and setting up to make floppies is a total pain.
2 I don't know HOW to use fdisk



Originally posted by Direwolf20
Are the hard drives formatted with NTFS (You mentioned XP). If so, then dos won't be able to read it at all.
Click to expand...

no, sisters computer was running 98, with 3 harddrives, 1 with the OS, and the other two for data.

I have a 13gig data drive that I replaced with an 80 gig in my box, the 13 was fat32.

Originally posted by ameoba
If you have partition magic, have you tried blasting the existing partitions and installing 98/XP after that?
Click to expand...

yes, on the 13gig, I first tried using the XP cd to format it to ntfs and install xp, it would NOT format to ntfs, I finally got it to format fat32 but xp would still not install, so I tried Pmagic, it would format to fat32X or ntfs no problem, but xp still would not install, so I tried to install a backup image of my OS {xp} using Drive Image to the unformatted drive, (which involved burning 8 CDs on my 4x burner :rolleyes: } it threw a error 701 - problem with init13.
same with trying to install an image of 98 from before xp - 701.

so I decided to try it on the Ksisters first data drive {6gig} which I TOLD her to move all the data off of, shift it to the third {20gig} drive.

Pmagic shows that she did clear off the first partition pretty much, but the second partition has like 3gig of data on it.

I want to see what that data IS to decide whether to nuke it or plug the drive into this computer and spend another few hours burning CDs

hence the question - how do I run dir in dos when I can't find the drive in dos ????


Originally posted by ameoba
...or you could just download Knoppix and not even bother installing on the HDD ;)
Click to expand...

a SWELL idea I might try, except
1 I am on a 28.8 dialup & knoppix is 700mb :eek:
2 this computer is for LITTLE SISTER, who is as computer literate as this screwdriver.

{if I ever get this going again for her, she HAS high speed, so I might try knoppix ;) }



cloaked and starbuck8968 , I want to DIR the drive NOT format it, it sounds like you are discussing formatting commands. ???
 
is the fat32 my problem in dir-ing the partitions ????????
Click to expand...

Yes, DOS only recognizes FAT16 partitions. You will need to run FDISK with should be on disk 1 of your MS-DOS disks.
 
If you can't get a Windows install to work, you might look into there being a hardware problem... like bad ram or something.

As for sister not being computer literate then Knoppix would be just as good as windows. If you're lost in a foreign country where you don't speak the language, it doesn't really matter if you're in Mongolia or Zimbabwe.
 
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