badly need help with hard disk(sorta long)

[Bohrn]

Well, at least I think it is my hard disk. Not in my main machine but in a freinds old/new machine. He got it given to him, and it doesn't work. and he knows absolutely 0 about computers.

Fisrt off, I took the case apart and cleaned the huge amounts of dust out of it. Then I put in only the power supply,mb, mem, video card, and 3 drives(floppy, hd, and cd). HD and CD are primary masters of channel 1 and 2 IDE.

Next I booted from a 98SE boot disk(i don't have a 95 boot disk), and all seemed good,

fdisked and formatted, full size, one partition. No bad sectors or other nastiness.

then rebooted, and ran setup from the 95 CD.

When scandisk tried to run from the cd, I got a nasty message that I have never seen before.

"this version of Microsoft Scandisk will only work with MS-dos 5.0 or later. Setup found a compressed volume or disc caching software on your system. Quit setup and check your compressed disk with your compression software, or remove your disk caching utility. Then run setup again. If you have already done this, hit esc to continue. Or hit enter to exit setup."

I have done countless fdisks and formats, with reinstalls alot. Never have I had this problem.

I have low-level formatted the disk in the bios, I have used 3rd party software to remove any old NTFS or other hidden stuff.

I ran setup with a "no smartdrive" command, thinking of the disc caching part of the error message.

I ran setup with a "no scandisk" command, hoping to fool it.

But no matter what happens, if scandisk is bypassed, and then the normal windows setup stuff starts, just after the liscence agreement part comes up, I get another error, as follows

Error SU-0013

"setup could not create files on your startup drive and setup cannot continue. If you have HPFS or NTFS, you must create an MSDOS boot partition. If you have Lantastic server or SuperStor compression, disable it before running setup again."

So what the heck is up here??

I tried running 3 different 95 CDroms. (ME needs 32megs and he only has 24)

I copied (with my main machine) the whole Win95 cd to the disk in ?? and then ran the setup from there. Same story. But if I run the scandisk from a floppy, no probs at all.

Also, I put the ?able disk in my machine and ran Norton Disk Doctor(utilities 2k2) and no problems either, and I can copy alot of files on it, no probs.

specs are as follows

Rhino mb, with Award bios, and iHX chipset

24megs 72pin fp ram

iPentium 100

fujitsu floppy(1.44meg)

WD Caviar 2.5gig mode 4 HD

Creative 4x CD rom

ATI Mach64 PCI video


Pls help...at wits end...need sleep

PS, i know this is long, and I thank you for reading this, and for whatever help you can give.

John

[Agent31]

could be the master boot record needs formatting... I obviously can't guarantee anything, but if you've fdisked it already it's not going to do any harm to try this too... don't worry though, this won't kill your data...

fdisk /mbr

[Bohrn]

ok, I will try that tommorow after work. Thanx for the fast reply.

Oh, and no worry, there is no data on the disk, only a floppy at this time and the CD of course

thanx again.

If not this, what could it be??

I am open to ideas

[Agent31]

I suspect this might well fix it, but I guess you'll just have to wait and see!

[DGhost]

you formatted it fat32 when you should have formatted it fat16, i bet.

if you have Windows 95b then you can ignore me, but otherwise run fdisk again, make sure you select no when it asks you "would you like to enable large disk support", then repartition the drive. you will have to make it two partitions (one 2gb and one .5gb) and then format the drives (again!).

the initial error message is normal because of the differences between DOS for Win95 and DOS for Win98. it just happens.

the second error is more indicitive of the above.

if all else fails, go to www.bootdisk.com and get a Windows 95 start up disk =).

[Agent31]

ye gods, why didn't I think of that... goes to show how long it's been since my Win95 CD became a drink coaster!

[Sasq]

God damn it dghost you beat me too it

Bootdisk.com has saved my but soooo many times.

[DGhost]

lol

yay! i contributed something useful for once!

[Sasq]

Thinking of bootdisk.com. A long time ago when I still used win98/95 etc. I took a bootdisk img (think i got it from bootdisk.com) and made a bootable cd using cdrwin with whichever version of windows that matched the boot image as the main content of the cd.

Saved going off to repair a broken pc and discovering my/their boot disk's were dead.

Dan

[Bohrn]

ok, the /mbr thing didn't work, so after work, I will try fdisk with fat16.

I was hoping to make it a full disk tho, like I said he is illiterate with these things.

tried the url, good site, but the disk they gave me hung my machine, so no good. oh well

thanx for the help guys, I will talk to ya after work

John

[Bohrn]

ok, I fdisked with fat16 (2 drives, 2 gig and the rest), formatted them, and rebooted.

windows setup still gives the same error message about the NTFS or HPFS thing or the disk cache crap.

but now if I bypass scandisk, I can start windows setup without the other error, but where it used to happen now i get dumped back to the E:\ with the following error

"Standard Mode: Bad Fault in MS-Dos extender. Fault:000D Stack Dump:0000 0000 0070. Raw Fault Frame:EC=0000. IP=28AA. CS=043F. FL=3246. SP=D88E. SS=02C7"

so what the hell does this mean??

thanx again guys

John

[Sasq]

port of last call, go to western digital and get data lifeguard.

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

do a low level format on the disk (the write test), I had a drive once before that this was the only way to clear it so i could install an older os (NT4 actually)

Good luck

Dan

[PowerHungry]

For the heck of it, before you low level format the drive again, see if boot virus protection is enabled in the BIOS.

I had an old system I couldn't install 98 onto because the BIOS was blocking windows from modifying the boot sector. I beleive it caused the same problem.

[RichardI]

"Fault:000D"

A OD error is a hardware error.

I'd get your RAM and CPU checked.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Also make sure the HD isn't jumpered to use one of those wierd compatibility modes.