A mate has just got hold of a pc with windows NT on it and I he's asked me to delete that and put windows 95/me on it. The problem I have is I can't get it to boot off the floppy drive and I can't get it to exit windows into DOS. Any ideas how I can format the drive hard drive?????????

 

Cheers

 

Vijay

Have you checked/changed the BIOS to make it boot from the floppy, or is still not playing even after doing that?

You can't mix and match OSs like that. I am not the right person to get advice from so please get this checked by real guru.

 

Win95 / Win ME use different file systems on the HDD. As does Win NT.

 

Depending on the version of NT, you probably don't have DOS on the PC to exit to - on early Windows, they ran "on top" of DOS. On later Windows, Win NT there is no DOS, just Windows.

 

Its a complete nightmare. If you're lucky, you'll somehow be able to boot DOS (if you have an old DOS floppy) or has your mate kept his emergency floppy set up to date (no)?

 

I hope he's kept his data, cos I can't see anyway of changing the OSs you describe without a serious risk....

 

Sorry

Windows 98 and ME where bootable CD's.

 

Put the boot sequence in the BIOS so it boots from the CD first. The installation should format the HDD.

Cheers guys.

 

I did change the bios settings to boot from floppy (with a windows recovery disk), then cd (with windows me install cd), then h.d, but all it did was go straight into windows nt everytime??????? do you think there might be a problem with the pc?

 

Vijay

Vijay. can u get to the command line in dos, if so just type lock C and then type format C, this will wipe the drive and then reinstall O/S of choice from CD

Boot from the CD first. You get a menu with 2 options I think. Boot from CD, Boot from HDD.

 

When you select Boot from CD you get another menu asking what you want.

Install Windows

DOS prompt with CD support

DOS prompt without CD suport

 

This is what happened when I did it anyway.

 

Stuart

NT has no DOS (it's too good for that!)

You need to use a DOS/Win95/98 boot disk and boot from it, run FDISK and delete the non-DOS NTFS partition.

Reboot the PC from the disk, run FDISK again and create a partition and make it bootable. Reboot again and FORMAT C: /S

 

If you are installing Win98 or something then all you have to do is use FDISK as above to delete the existing partition and then boot from the Win98 CD to format it and re-install all in one go.

 

Sounds like the BIOS is not set to boot from floppy or the floppy drive is not working correctly. Is the disk you are trying to boot from definately bootable? It needs to be a proper system disk.