Having One Heck Of a time with a boot disk

[QBasicMac]

it is not allowing me to FDisk. It's not allowing me to boot from a boot disk.

This makes no sense. Even if you remove your hard disk and throw it in the garbage, you should be able to boot from your DOS floppy. If not, your boot order is wrong. It should show floppy before hard drive. If it shows CD before floppy, then make sure you have no CD mounted.

How are you able to post here? Try your boot floppy on that computer (not the fdisk, obviously). Does it boot?

Try harder here. Forget all about the hard drive. Concentrate on booting up in DOS from a floppy.

Mac

[SnowbirdSJ]

I have 6 computers that is how I'm able to post here and still have the problem as it's on another system. The system I'm trying to do this all on is a Hewlett Packard Pavilion 6330. The boot order is as follows:
1. floppy
2. hard drive
3. cd-rom
4. network boot

In the BIOS it has Installed O/S as Win98/WinNT5.0

I've been concentrating on trying to boot it up directly to DOS from the floppy but it's not letting me.

All I did in the beginning was FDisk the hard drive and made it active and since then I've never been able to do anything further accept to look at what is on a floppy disk.

[QBasicMac]

Right! Then your problem is that the floppy is bad.

(I presume you tried the floppy on all computers and you cannot boot from it)

You have to get a new floppy.

Forget hard drives. They have nothing to do with the problem, whether they work or not. The problem is your floppy: it is no good. If it were good, it would boot up on any computer.

(If it boots from all but one computer, the motherboard is bad or something worse if the boot order is as you said)

Mac

[patio]

Why don't you hook it up to a known working machine as a slave and try formatting it ? ?
Since your first post said FDisk went OK the first time it should be OK.
Did you set the partition as active ? ?
I have to admit i've never ran into these problems doing basic disk prep work from a floppy...

patio.   8-)

Our Own FDisk Tutorial

[2k_dummy]

The size of the drive and whether ot not a third party partioning program was used might be the source of your problem. Partioning software such as Western Digital's EZ Drive move the boot sector from sector one to sector two. A boot sector virus will move sector one to another location that it can access and write itself to sector one. Also note that fdisk does not remove partion information but modifies it after a disk has been fdisked once. I didn't look up your model number, but if this is a laptop, you might have to have the manufacturers support to restore it. If it is a PC, you can probably run a debug script to remove any partion information stored on it and then fdisk/format normally. You have most likely already lost any drivers for your audio/video/etc so will need to locate them on the internet. If you want to try a debug script I will post one. DISCLAIMER: It is not advisable to run a debug script on a laptop. For most PC's it is OK, but you do so at your own risk.