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Problems with reinstalling Win ME
Ok. I will start from the beginning for everyone. I am sorry if this is long.
My computer is custom built. A friend of mine put everything together. It has a 60 GB hard drive, a CD-ROM, a floppy and a Zip 100. When he first connected everything, he set the hard drive as the primary master, the Zip as the primary slave and the CD as the seconday master. When I installed Win ME, it tried to make the Zip a second hard drive. Since I didn't know what was happening, I just put a blank disk in the Zip and let my computer think it was a second hard drive and it all worked fine.
Eventually I reformatted. When I did, I decided I wanted to fix this problem of it thinking my Zip is a hard drive. I changed the cables and made the Zip the secondary slave. When I reinstalled, I got it to work, but I remember having to do some trick to make it work. I don't remember what I did, but that doesn't matter.
Now, I am reinstalling again and running into problems. First, I used fdisk and deleted everything. Now, in fdisk, choice 5 is to change the current fixed drive. If I choose that, there are 2 drives showing. 1 is my 60 GB hard drive. 2 is a 96 mb drive. When I try to install Win ME, it will first format C (my actual hard drive) and then will try and format D. It will eventually format D. Next, scandisk will run. It will first check C and find no problems. Next, it will check D but find nothing but problems. I think the first check is media descriptors. It will say it found errors and I will click to fix. Next I think it checks file allocation transfers. It will also find many errors and when I went through it the first time, it had so many errors, I got tired of pressing "Fix It". When I told it to not fix the errors, the installation couldn't continue because one of my hard drives had errors.
So, I went back into fdisk and deleted all of the partitions again and created one new one on C drive and nothing on D. When I installed, the same thing happened. I got help from someone else, and they gave me some suggestions.
First they told me to change the cables so my hard drive was primary master and my CD was primary slave. I have done that and my jumpers are correct. I had to set the hard drive jumper to cable select because anything else and it could not be detected. I then set my Zip to secondary master, and its jumpers are correct. After that, he said I should use the floppy boot disk to start the computer and to get into fdisk. I should then delete everything and create a new DOS partition on the C drive and reboot. After that, I should enter setup and change by boot order so that the CD was first. Then I should restart and not have the floopy in the computer at all, and just use the Win ME CD. He thought the floppy was creating this fake drive. Well, I tried that and the CD would not boot. First it just froze. The second time it said I have an invalid system disk. Also, I do have an actual CD. I have no pirated or burned software.
I am just at a loss right now. I have no idea what to do. I have already reformatted multiple times. I do not have access to a burner, so I can't download large files. I do have XP Pro, but I cannot use it on my computer because most of the hardware is not compatible. I have already tried to install it and a lot of things did not work. But, if installing XP and then installing ME over that will work, I can try that. I don' t have any other OS versions.
Currently, my physical hard drive is C. This unknown hard drive is D. My CD is E. My floppy is A. I cannot read off my Zip drive. If I switch to D from DOS and try anything, it says invalid file format, abort, retry, fail, or something like that. I guarantee all of my cables are correct for the way it is set up. I have also taken out my motherboard battery and the jumper to reset the system, and that is not working. I have also tried setting everything up without the Zip connected at all, and still ran into the same problem.
I can't think of anything else I can say about this. I can always try and remove the Zip again to see if I did something wrong the first time. Other than that, I don't know what to do. I have posted this on a few different forums and nobody has been able to help me. I really hope someone here has a good idea that might do the trick.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Ryan
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