Win95 and a 486sx 16mhz

[uethello]

Seriously, a real living breathing dinosaur.

It's for a friend, he says he may have deleted something. Of course, he has no CD.

All the hardware is good. When I try to boot from the HDD it tells me to insert a system disk, when I boot off the emergency floppy, and go into C:\windows > "win" > enter, it says it can't find himem.sys. (I looked, it's there).

any suggestions, other than shooting a dinosaur?

[TOAD6147]

Perhaps a boot virus? Maybe try the fdisk /mbr (?) Anyway it sounds like the boot sector is toast or esle your autoexec and config.sys may need some work. I'm sure someone with more DOS experience will be by shortly.

[uethello]

Well, this "rig" has never seen the internet. I guess it's possible he got a virus via floppy, but I kind of doubt it.

tried a fdisk /mbr, no joy.

[excuzzzeme]

Check to see where it point to the himem.sys Make sure its pointing to the correct drive and directory.

[uethello]

point to the himem.sys

Do you mean the "path" command?

[nukes]

no, in config.sys on the boot disk, add the line:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS

(it may be in the SYSTEM directory)
To restore the boot sector, get a Win95 boot disk, boot with it.
Go to c:\windows\command

c:
cd \windows\command

and type "sys c:"
Tell us if that worked.

[uethello]

Using the attrib command, I can see io.sys on my diskette, but can't find it on the HDD. I thought it was impossible to erase io.sys?

edit: Oh, just a second, I only read the first part of your reply, let me try the sys c:

[uethello]

Doh! it says: "Incorrect MS-DOS version"

[nukes]

It needs to be created with that version of Win95. Try a bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com I think this is the one you want (if its OSR2)
http://web.tampabay.rr.com/jokrow/downloads/boot95b.exe
As far as I can gather, you just need to run that executable and it should create the disk in the drive. Be sure to scan it for virii etc before you run it. I can't vouch for its integrity, but I've heard good things about that site.
Alternativley, you could re-install over the top (I wouldn't do this just yet) by looking to see if the install files have been copied to c:\windows\options\cabs\ and if so, running setup.
Alternativley, remember setver from your DOS days? Well that may help here. I would guess you just set the version to 7.01 or whatever.
http://www.computerhope.com/setverhl.htm

[uethello]

Ok, let me go back through and actually see what I did and didn't.

virus > it's possible, don't really have anything here to use to check without some type of windows. I'll hope this isn't it for now.

fdisk /mbr > did it, but it seemed supernaturally fast, and instead of giving me some sort of response that anything happened, it just popped an a:> as soon as I pressed return. However, it also didn't give me a "not recognized" msg which is good

himem.sys > added the line, nothing changed.

sys c: > working on it, had 95a and 95b (bootdisk) already downloaded from bootdisk.com, but 95b was bad. Got it from your source, good.

I'll update when I'm finished.