NoteBIOS partition of file does not exist

[magic_plank]

Hi,

I recieved recently a laptop. As it goes through BIOS this message appears:

"noteBIOS partition or file does not exist
 Save to disk feature is disabled"

If I press a key and continue, MS Scandisk comes up and hangs for a few minutes, and then says something about an error on your hard drive. The windows 98 bitmap comes up andhangs for five minutes, and then says something like

"error reading drive c:
ABort/Retry/Fail?"

accessing C:\ and then typing DIR causes machine to freeze up completely after the computer has finished listing.

it is a Cedar Laptop (I don't know who made it) Pentium, 16mb RAM. No battery.

I assume making a noteBIOS file or partition would solve the problem. I cant re-install windows, setup hangs at the routine check.

[magic_plank]

I just found a utility called PHDISK.EXE to remake the partition or file, but It won't work because I dont have a primary dos partition, apparantly, and fdisk cant write one because writing to the hard drive is disabled! arg!

[Rob Pomeroy]

Writing to the hard drive is disabled?!  Odd.  This laptop may well be more of a curse than a blessing.  But the first thing I would try would be to install a spare (or second hand) hard drive into it, for testing purposes.  Taking a laptop apart is not a great plan unless you're reasonably confident in that area, but without opening it up, I think this problem may be hard to diagnose.

You could get a much better (working) laptop for very little money on eBay, incidentally.

[GX1_Man]

Just let it go.The hard drive may be dead, there is no support for this make, it only has 16meg RAM and who knows what else, etc.