D4100 bad HD windows reinstall help!

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lobotomy@webtv.net wrote:

>Hello all,
>My 4100 was infected with something that wold not allow the HD to boot
>up. It freezes up on boot, defrag & scandisk as well.
>I installed a new HD & loaded Win 95b into it, all is OK, special thanks
>to WZsr. for his help.

If you're eventually going to want to run Win98SE [as suggested
below], why did you load Win95 on the new drive instead of Win98?
Seems to me that would have been simpler. Unless you are aiming
at having a dual-boot Win95b/Win98SE system for some reason.

>Now I put the infected crashed HD back into the system as a non bootable
>HD, and I was able to retrieve all my info from it, all the contents in
>it read OK and functions fine as long I do not do a defrag or scandisk
>(it will freeze).

>In this mode, can I wipe it clean & install Win 98se into it? The new
>bootable drive is "C", the infected one is partitioned ("D & E" ).
>Can I leave it in the system as is to do a clean install of Win 98se?
>How would I wipe it out, reformat, scandisk & reload it from where it is
>currently ? I am thinking I must put it back as a bootable HD to do the
>above.

Taking the last first, and disremembering what DOS
commands/functions were available in Win95b, you can use the DOS
fdisk and format commands to redo the problem drive. Or there
are any number of third-party programs [I've used Partition Magic
forever] available. An fdisk initialization followed by a format
of that original drive will eliminated the need for the scandisk
- since the fdisk/format would have identified/marked any bad
sectors. A third-party program may require selection of
initialization/format [e.g., PM is intended to do its
repartitioning without destroying any of your data, unless you
specify intitialization and/or formatting] but they will take the
drive back to ground zero also.

At this late date [and the fact that I have never, ever,
set-up/used a dual boot system], I disremember how amenable
Win95b and Win98SE were to being part of a dual-boot system.


--
OJ III
[Email to Yahoo address may be burned before reading.
Lower and crunch the sig and you'll net me at comcast.]

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

lobotomy@webtv.net wrote:

>OJIII,
>I reinstalled 95 & a new HD with the intent of recovering my old HD
>contents, which I was able to do. I was not sure if I would be able to
>run & recover my WIN95 HD contents if I had installed WIN98 into the new
>primary drive.
>Steve C.

Understand. There wouldn't have been a problem in recovery. And
other than some /really/ ancient DOS programs, anything that ran
in 95 would run in 98. But no harm done, other than a small
amount of time duplicating installs.
--
OJ III
[Email to Yahoo address may be burned before reading.
Lower and crunch the sig and you'll net me at comcast.]