>>>and then it DISSAPEARED<<<

Hi, people I can really need your help on this one!!

due to some misterious crash on our comp, it doesnt seem to have a C-drive anymore. I think that because of some virus a antivirussystem deleted a certain file. everytime when I restarted the comp to format, more memory dissapeared.
I wasn't able to format my comp.
only and old dos system managed to created a partition of 2000Mb
of the old 10000Mb
in bios and fdisk they recognize the size of the harddrive, I cant see how to create a bigger partion then 2000Mb
when I try to format the C-drive it only formats the 2000Mb
when running a diagnostic program
alarms popup with things like: wrong number of clusters, invalid FAT type etc..

can somebody plzzzz help me with this 'cause I haven't enough money for another comp...
:(

The old dos you say? I believe the old dos uses the fat16 filesystem which only supports disks up to 2GB (2000MB). That can be the reason for why your disk won't be formatted to it's real size.

You can try to use windows 98 or later startup disk, and use fdisk from the command prompt. It's gonna make a partition with fat32, which supports large disks. Then, when you format, the whole disk's gonna be formatted.

I tried to boot from windows rescue disc and windows 98 cdrom
but these couldnt detect a C-drive to write their information to..
they say something like: medium type invalid and you are correct the dos created a FAT16 partition.

(I assume you use Windows as OS)

You might be using an old version of DOS. Try getting a new one, from any Win98 or higher.

I like to use delpart.exe also, and then fdisk to re-partition. (look for it on google.com)

It doesn't sound like a hardware problem.

Let us know how it goes...

BTW, you will not need to buy a new comp, only a new HD if everything goes wrong, lol.

Try to convert from fat16 to fat32 with cvt.exe located here http://www.powerload.fsnet.co.uk/win9x.htm

Tomsan, what I would do in your case is remove the entire partition table, and start over. This will result in the loss of all data on your disc, however.

This link will bring you to a step-by-step tutorial on how to delete your partition table - it also has links to all the software you need (actually, that will fit on one floppy). On the bottom of the page is a link that will bring you to another page that (again, step by step) will guide you through creating partitions, both fat16 (up to 2GB) and fat32 (2GB++)

Good luck to you. One word of advise: if you're new to this, do things slowly. Make sure you have read all the pages before you continue, so you know what to expect. Printing out the pages before you continue won't hurt. Like I said, good luck.

:D I finally managed to restore my system.
I first installed the primary dos-partition with ms-dos 6.22 (the only OS I could run, but it didn't support FAT 32). Then I installed win98 on this 2gb large partition so that I could use the new version of Fdisk that does support FAT 32. I deleted the primary partition. Altered the boot sequence so it started with my cd-rom, while my computer kept rejecting my rescue-boot floppy. Put in the win98 cd and it finally formatted my entire harddisk and made one partition of it! I had to format it again and boot from my rescue-disk (which suddenly worked) while the win98 cd was giving error messages over and over again that it couldn't find some files on the cd-rom. A complicated way to format and restore your system...but hé...it kept me of the streets for a while.