can't boot up from Win 98 SE CD

[LiLJay]

When I try to boot from my hard drive, it begins to load Win98 and then it goes back to DOS and says "Type the name of the command interpreter."

I tried to boot from Win 98 CD and it says it cannot read or write to drive C.

Is this a problem with my hard drive?

Thanks!

 

[Rollin' Rog]

It may be a problem with the hard drive not being detected, the master boot record or even more likely with the partition information being corrupted, possibly by a virus.

Try booting with a startup disk. When you get to the a:\> prompt enter:

fdisk /status

is the size and partition information for your hard drive shown correctly?

If you allow the startup disk to boot with cd-rom support, watch to see what letter gets assigned the "ram drive". If it is 'c' and not 'd', your hard drive is not even being detected.

See also...

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000012.htm