help with booting old computer win98

[brian5258]

ok so i got a hold of this old computer, it's 166 mhz pentium 32 megs of ram 1.6 gig hard drive, it has win 98 installed. so i booted it up and it was working fine so i ran scan disk. scan disk said it found bad sectors and could repair them, so i said ok. and while it was repairing the bad sectors the computer froze and i had to restart. when i went to boot it up again i got "hard disk failure" or something very similar. so i made a boot disk with my other 98se computer and it said it can't copy the system files to the destination. and i tried typing c:\ at the dos prompt and i keep getting a bad sector abort rety fail message. is my hard drive physically damaged or do i just need to format c:\ and reinstall windows(which i've never done before) oh and also if i try to start up the computer without a startup disk, for some reason i don't get the hard disk failure message any more, it just said invalid system disk replace the disk and press a key, but there's nothing in the floppy drive.

[phext]

do fdisk and get rid of all partitions and then make a new one.
reboot.
format the new partition.
run scandisk before trying to reinstall 98se.

you can also hook it up to another computer and use the other computer to run scandisk on it.

a hard drive like that is easily found for free, so personally I would just get another one. I got a few layin around, want one? lol http://www.resellerratings.com/forum/
http://www.resellerratings.com/forum/#

[brian5258]

i'm almost positive the hard drive is dead or dying. i can't format it, first it said there wasn't enough memory so i did a format c: /u and then it said something stupid. and then i kept getting no fixed disk. and every other 5 minutes my my cmos/bios wont detect it

sure, are they ide?

[sechs]

I'd suggest attempting to use the manufacturer's utilities on the drive.

If it isn't always popping up in the BIOS, it may be the firmware or electronics are bad.

[brian5258]

well i can't always access the drive. where would the manufacturer's utilities be on the disk? and which utilities do you mean? and the firmware of electronics of what, the motherboard?

[sechs]

You will need to download the utilities from the manufacturer's website.

[roley]

When drives are like this, only utilities like Spinrite are going to tell you for sure if they are failing.

Just acquire another 2nd hand drive from somewhere and use that. You should be able to get around on a drive very easily.

Roley
Black Frog Tech