Wiped hard disk & cannot load fdisk on.

[chrispatt45]

Hi All,
I have an old toshiba 200cdt laptop which i would like to get up and running again. The hard drive has been completely wiped and I need to get fdisk again. I do not have a floppy drive, only a cd drive. I have tried putting fdisk and windows 95 boot disks onto a boot cd with nero although it will not give me anything other than the "missing operating system". The bios seems to be functioning okay but I noticed that it only has boot order of floppy or hard drive, could this be anything to do with why the cd wont boot?.
I would be very grateful for any help that can be given.

Many Thanks.

 

[Rockn]

Yea, that could be part of the problem. Don't you have the interchangeable drive bays on the laptop you can change from CD to floppy? The only other way I can think of doing it would be to take the drive out and do it on a PC with an IDE adapter.

 

[chrispatt45]

yeh I think it is interchangable but I have nothing to put into it. How breifly if u dont mind me asking do you sort it on another pc with the ide?, forgive my ignorance, the technical side isnt really my field.

 

[chrispatt45]

Do you mean attaching the hard disk to another pc IDE and tring to sort it out from there?

 

[DaveBurnett]

Yes he does.

 

[Rockn]

What he said. You should also make up an autoexec.bat and config.sys so you can access the CD-ROM once the PC boots up.

 

[Arky]

Go to this site
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/
for the ultimate boot CD. It's loaded with just about any tool you will need to solve your problem.

 

[Triple6]

You need to add CD-ROM to the boot order or else it won't boot from any CD - it might be possible to add the CD-ROM to the sequence or replace the floppy entry with CD-ROM.

 

[crjdriver]

One suggestion would be to pull the drive and connect it to another computer. Fdisk and format with the /s switch using a win9x boot disk or format it in a win9x computer. Copy the i386 folder to the drive and include a copy of smartdrive; you will need it for the install. Now place the drive back in the laptop and boot. Change to the i386 folder and type smartdrv.exe to run smart drive. Now type winnt to start the install process. Just do not choose to format the drive during the install process.

This is a round about, convoluted way of doing things, however it should work.

 

[chrispatt45]

Thanks a million, I will give this a try and hopefully it should work. Thanks again.