HEy Gang I have a UWAVE motherboard with 3 pc133 ram sticks128mb ea, I was able to boot from a cd and format the hard drive in both fat32 and ntfs, at different times, but both time as it restarted there would only be a blank screen shown. no beeps no noise no screen flicker!!!!!!!
any on know what direction I could take to fix this? also when I pull out the disk and restart it tells me that the ntldr is missing!~ how do I fix that?!?!?
source OS iso file burned to disk through IMGBURN
Do you have any other partitions on the drive? It soulds like your mbr may be corrupt. I've had similar problems in the past, and what I've found works best is to run killdisk or an equivilant drive cleaner and then format and load an os.
You will need either FDISK (on bootable floppy, found in Windows 9x in the Windows/command folder) or Windows XP setup CD to make the HD bootable. The drive must be set as ACTIVE in its boot sector. You can use FDISK (FAT16/FAT32 only) to set it manually or simply format the drive with windows XP setup program (FAT32/NTFS), in which case it will be automatically set as active, but with no OS installed whatsoever, unless you proceed with XP installation.
If you are planning to use Windows 9x, I suggest that you make a bootable floppy on existing Windows 9x platform and manually copy FORMAT.EXE and FDISK.EXE to that floppy (Windows XP bootable floppy does not include CD drivers bundle). That way you can boot via floppy and have needed drivers for CD. Once you boot via floppy, you will need to to this:
- Start FDISK by typing "FDISK".
- Once prompted for large partition support choose yes (actually, "Yes" means FAT32, and "No" means FAT16 with 2GB per partition limit)
- create a logical drive/primary partition and set it as active (if not automatically.. check the status)
- you must reboot for the changes to be registered with BIOS
- once rebooted (again, via floppy) type this:
FORMAT C: /s
- once it finishes, you will have bootable HD with minimal OS. I suggest that you copy contents of the Windows 98 contents directly to HD. Type:
C:
MD SETUP
COPY D:\SETUP\*.* C:\SETUP
After that reboot and change the boot sequence in BIOS to HD first, and run windows setup from command prompt. Type:
CD SETUP
SETUP
If you run windows setup while the machine is booted from floppy, it will take allot longer to complete the first round of setup. Your floppy will be extensively read from, and it will slow down everything allot.
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