Weird story/problem

[sboulema]

Today i went to a person to fix his computer. It would boot up and say operation system not found, so i booted into DOS, and checked the C: disk. It was empty :| So i fired up PM8.02 to check the disk and i thorugh a whole army of errors and partition table errors at me. So i thought fdisk the sucker (there was no important data on it. I first tried to format with PM but that gave even more errors). Fdisk detected that the drive was 1 gig large, but it was 10 gig :| , so i thought hmm this drive is dead/dying. But i fdsisked it and then format to end up with a 1 gig partition. after that i installed Win98, but near the end where it is creating the controlpanel and startgroups it just froze. Tried restarting and still at the point where it creates the startmenu groups it stopped. So i gave up
But later the person called and said that he changed the boot-sequence from "Cdrom-c-a" to "c-a" and that the install of win98 finished correctly :S

My questions are:
- was this drive dying/dead or not
- how the f*ck can the boot-sequence have anything to do with a Win98 install :S

I hope you guys can help me, cause it has be something else, i cant believe the boot-sequence has antyhing to do with it, it has to be coincidence or something...

 

[mbx]

I would say that someone had changed the LBA setting in the BIOS and disabled it.
The BIOS would see the disk with different geometry (the MBR would be in a different place) hence it not booting, and the drive size being different.
Then again, the drive might be on it's way out, and the install finishing was a fluke (it may have read/write failures and managed to write the particular sector before timing-out).

My gut feeling would be the LBA though

 

[daddyo]

That drive is toast. Spend the $49 and get a new 40 gig drive. It'll be much faster and you won't get any errors.

I'm assuming that your RAM is in good working order. Bad RAM can cause the OS installation to stop. Don't know about the boot order thing though.

 

[sboulema]

LBA? never heard of it.

Important thing for me is to know that the boot-sequence doesnt have anything to do with it cause its irritating me.

It was a pentium 1 with 64mb ram, so not even worth saving