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Oddball Problem

I have a machine, that all of the sudden refuses to boot from the hard drive. It's running Windows '95 and I can boot it from the floppy drive, and from there I can access the hard drive. When I first do a directory (dir c:) on the hard drive, the Directory comes up and everything looks normal. If I try and change into the windows directory, it comes back with an error message that says somthing like "invalid directory". If I do another directory, the Windows directory has been renamed sindows. the thing is, if you reboot the machine, the windows directoy is named windows until you try and access it, and it's renamed again.

My Virus software (McAfee) couldn't find any viruses, but it only seems to happen with the windows directory, and it's renamed the same thing every time.

I can't reformat and start over, as much as I'd like to.

Timm N.

busuka

Really odd things. Try F-PROT antivirus (2.28). You can take it
from Garbo (http://garbo.uwasa.fi). How HD configured in BIOS ?
I mean what type used for it (Normal, Large, LBA) ? What size of
HD ? Try to run ScanDisk. Maybe you have trivial FAT error.

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busuka

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timmn

ASKER

The size of the Hard drive is 250 MB and is configured in the BIOS as Normal access. I am having problems making scandisk run, it keeps saying I don't have enough memory, however I'm sure I'll get it to run as soon as I get more time to work on it.

Frankly, I didn't even think of running scandisk.

Thanks.

busuka

You can run ScanDisk from DOS if Win95 one gives you problems. To
do this:
- press F8 right after message 'Starting Windows95'
- select from menu 'Command prompt only'
- run SCANDISK from folder \Windows\Command

timmn

ASKER

Buska:

That would be fine if I could boot from the hard drive, but I am booting with a floppy. I formatted the floppy on another machine running Windows '95, then I copied Scandisk to it. I boot from that floppy, it takes me to a DOS prompt. When I try running scandisk, I get a message that says somthing about a memory manager not being installed.

I haven't been able to work on the machine for the past couple of days, but I'm sure I'll get scandisk to work sooner or later.

Thanks,

Timm N.

busuka

Hmm, so this is also simple:
- just copy to the diskette files: HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE
- create on floppy file CONFIG.SYS, that contains:

DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=EMM386.EXE NOEMS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
FILEShigh=50
BUFFERShigh=30

That's it.

timmn

ASKER

Here is a good one for you, Scandisk says everything is fine.

I managed to get the needed data off of the hard disk, I'm going to reformat and start over, better yet, I'm going to replace the hard drive.

Thanks for all your help,

Timm N.