AHHH!!! THIS COMPUTER IS SCREWED!!

[Diablo]

Alrite, here's the situation, my family comes to me w/ all their computer probs. The most recent one... apparently they installed Norton Systemworks Pro 2001 on their older pc. They ran several tests (windoctor, disk doctor, & system check). Apparently 300+ errors occured, and they let norton try to autorepair them all. They reset the comp, hoping it would work better, but this didnt exactly happen. Messages of 9-10 missing .vxds came up, and the message "While initializing device SHELL cannot find or load required file KRNL386.exe File not found". The computer then goes to the "Its now safe to turn off your computer" (older comp). apparently none of the .vxd messages, nor the KRNL386 message have ever come up during their usage. I tried running safe mode, but this yielded the same thing. I can get into DOS mode. I tried format c:, but the drive is compressed, and apparently i need to access windows to format a compressed drive. I dled a few DOS utilities on my comp & put them on a disc, but they were pretty much crappy & didnt help. If anyone knows of any good DOS utilities, or can help me reformat this comp, i'd greatly appreciate it. fyi, i've never had to reformat a comp w/ out a restore cd, so i may need help if it comes to this. My stupid aunt is being a pain trying to get this comp back asap, so any help would greatly help. (descriptive help if complicated)

Thanx!

[sbp]

Maybe Diablo can put the compressed drive in another computer that runs windows and uncompress it.

[ChIcKeN_HaWk]

Blow away the partion. then format the drive.

[BADFlSH]

I am with ChIcKeN_HaWk, it should be pretty easy to Fdisk it and then format.

[Diablo]

update... alright, the computer was running a windows 98 prerelease (who knows why). & Yes, i did want to completely reformat the c: & start over from scratch.

They had given me "boot disk" & the cd (cdr) that they had compied the win98 prerelease on. Unfortunately i didn't check out the boot disk, which only has command.com on it. I did as ChIcKeN_HaWk said & unpartitioned the c: . Unfortunately, the boot disk doesn't help much, and the computer can't detect c: or the d: . I went into cmoss & autodetected the drives, which worked, but dos still doesn't recognize them. I do have DOS on a few disks, which will probably help, but i'm not exactly sure what to do from here.

what i'm thinking of doing : i'll try put their c: in my comp & slave it. Win98 should autodetect it, & i'll save copy the drivers to a floppy. Then i'll look at the sticker on the inside of thier comp on the cd rom, do a search for drivers, put those on a disk as well. Then make a Config.sys file that includes "Device=A:\<name of driver> /D:MSCD001"

Honestly, i don't really know what i'm doing, so descriptive replies would really help. Thanks (& sorry, i've never really needed to do this before)

[Diablo]

ok..got it to work. Just made a win98 boot disk w/ my computer, placed in their computer & it autodetected c: & d:. From there, i reformatted c: & reinstalled windows. Everything works fine. I guess i made it out to be harder than it really was. Thanks everyone!