Making a boot disk

[illusionist 0]

I apologise in advance if this tread is comewhere else in the forum but I could not find an answer.

I have a neighbours IBM PII 350 that they got from work. It has win2k on it on a drive that is 3.2GB but partitioned into 2 , 1.5 GB drives.

Right now the one drive is NTFS and the other fat. When they try to boot it gets to the windows desktop and a message saying explorer.exe has generated errors and must be shut down . At this point it keeps looping in the start sequence. There is nothing on either drive that they care to keep so I would like to fdisk and make it one partition.Reformat and reinstall OS. There is no way in the bios for changing boot sequences so that I can make it boot from the cd either. I can't figure out how to create a boot disk as the one I have is for fat 32 and if I try to fdisk it only recognises the fat partition.

Any help would be great and I thank everyone in advance.

 

L8tr

[clutch 1]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q197063

[illusionist 0]

Clutch

 

Thank you for your response. I followed the link you provided and created the 4 required boot and startup disks as directed at the site. I did this on another system as It was not possible on the system in question. When the disks were complete I proceeded to start the other system up using the first disk and second and so on. Everything was coming up fine.

The next step was not as obvious though as I could see not files in the 4 disks created that allowed for a format or Fdisk as I’ve been used to in regular boot disk operations.

 

During the setup process there was an area that allowed me to setup win2k on the existing 2 partitions , delet the partitions or exit setup . I chose to delete both partitions.

With that having been done I found myself in a bit of a bind as I could not format the new partition. After all else had failed I decided to shut down and boot with my win98 boot disk , which had fdisk and format commands on it. All drivers loaded and I proceeded to format the new single partition. Upon completion of the format I discovered I could not insert the win2k disk and ask to perform the “setup “ as the message came up “ this program cannot run in DOS” so I went through the process of rebooting and inserting each of the setup disks again. At this point I was given the option to setup win2k again and agreed to set this up on my single formatted partition. All went well and when the setup program said that there was no previous version to use for the upgrade it simply asked to remove the win2k cd and insert my win98 cd. I did this , it was recognized , and requested that I reinsert my win2k cd.

 

All is well and the system is up again ( just going through the update process) but I again wanted to thank you and wanted to document my procedure so that if any other person was going through the same thing there would be an account of the procedure . I found it interesting in this case that I was able to use an upgrade disc to install as the only way that I have found previously to install a clean version from a update disc was to direct the install to look on another cd drive for a previous version.

 

L8tr