Cannot Boot

[RH610]

Standard Dell Dimension L500R. Worked for years. Now will not boot from hard drive. Shows Dell Logo screen then just blinking cursor.
Can boot from floppy.
Hard drive does show up in BIOS.
It is the only hard drive in the PC.
If I boot to A> from floppy and try to go to C, it says invalid drive spec.
Drive shows up in FDISK (as NON-DOS partition!!!)
Cannot 'sys C:' it since DOS can't see it.
Tried FDISK /MBR without success.

Thank You

 

[WMH]

Sounds like you need a new Hard Drive. Was it making some kind of clanking or tapping sounds prior to it not working now? Even though BIOS sees it doesn't mean it is good. If you have an old Hard Drive laying around without anything on it (or even borrow one from someone), stick it in and see if it works. Another thing you can try is putting the Hard Drive as a master on the 2nd IDE channel (only if your BIOS supports booting off the 2nd channel) to see if it works. That way you can tell if you have a bad port on the mother board.

My expirence tells me that your HDD has crashed though.

Hope this helps, WMH
MCP+I, MCSE

 

[wolluf]

If you can try the drive in another machine....

(as fdisk can see some sort of partition, it may not be entirely dead).

 

[edfair]

Is your boot floppy capable of the filesystem on the hard drive. You could expect a non-dos partition with 6.22 when looking at a fat32 filesystem from 95b thru me.
Sounds like you need to a fdisk /mbr with a floppy of the same level as the system that is on the hard drive. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[RH610]

Right you both were.

I booted up with the proper boot disk this time (duh), did fdisk /mbr. This worked and I was able to access the drive which turned out to be semi-crashed. I was able to get the important data off of it and am now installing a new drive in the machine.

Thanks to all!