basic OS question
 

OK so I set up an old computer I had for my 5 year old to play games on. It runs Win95. Well, my daughter discovered how to delete files and was randomly deleting every file she could highlight before I stopped her(OK so she's pretty bright for her age!). Fortunately, she hadn't deleted any system files but the computer then was having alot of errors.

No problem I figure, I'll just reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS. When I put in the boot disc and tried to reformat it said I could not format a network drive. I remembered the computer used to be part of a home network so I figured I'll just stop sharing the drive in the computer settings and I'll be able to format.

Therein lies my problem. When I dbl click on network properties, the hourglass flickers on for a second and disappears and nothing happens. My daughter must have deleted that program. Can anybody tell me what settings I need to change in the system files to remove the network(sharing) properties?

Thanks

fdisk it and re partion it then format the drive. remember you cant format your c drive while your in windows. you have to boot into dos.

Make sure you hide any folders or files you don't want deleted next time. The WINDOWS and Program Files folders are tops on that list.

When I try to run fdisk I get "no space to create primary DOS partition"

I'm also trying to format from the A:\ prompt after using my boot disk so windows isn't loaded.

Also I just noticed my cd is loaded as the C drive instead of the D drive that I set in the boot disk-thats strange...

Good idea BoCo. Next time Ill hide the whole drive!:)

well, did you delete your primary dos partition before you tried to create one.

use option (3) i think to delete the partition, then use (1) to create a primary dos partition.

Dos boot disk----->option 2 (dos prompt)------>a:\format c:
use fdisk to create the partition then boot disk for fat32 format.

You simply need to make sure she can't break it. 95 is a lost cause, but you could put somethnig like foolproof security (had that back in high school) on it to keep her from braking shit, or don't let her use the damn thing unsupervised.

"When I try to run fdisk I get "no space to create primary DOS partition"

Also I just noticed my cd is loaded as the C drive instead of the D drive that I set in the boot disk-thats strange..."

if you are trying to fdisk the c drive (which is in this case your cdrom drive, however the hell that happened) then perhaps that is the cause of your "no space to create primary DOS partition" error message. try fdisking the D drive.

Yea this is really strange. I get an A and a B drive, which are both my floppy, and the C drive, which is my CD. There are no other drives available. Thats why I can't FDISK or FORMAT the C drive

My boot disc has both the config.sys loading the cd driver to D:MSD001 and the autoexec.bat loading mscd.exe/D:MSD001 so why is it coming up as C? This is freakin annoying me...

"so why is it coming up as C? This is freakin annoying me..."


have you checked your bios configuration?

Umm, I don't think your machine is seeing a formatted place on a fixed disk to call "c" drive.

If you installed a startup disk and told the machine to "format c:", you should have recieved the "warning, all data on c: will be lost, blah , blah".

When you start the machine, and before it boots, you should see a display of the master and slave drives the computer reckognises.

Start the 'puter and press, depending on the bios manufacturer, "del" before the boot process starts. This will enable you to see what the bios sees as far as available components. Your drives should be listed under the first option, basic bios stuff. You know, set the clock, set the drives. Also, after you check the drives, goto the next option (below the first). Many times the boot sequence is stored there. Try booting from the cd and just reinstall the whole darn thing from the original OS disk.

But, you still need to make sure your bios knows there is a valid drive there. Maybe she didn't do anything wrong. Maybe the ol' win 95 hard drive quit after all these years.

Those boot disks create a ramdrive, a drive created in your systems SDRAM (or EDO maybe) that has all of the files from the disk which you booted from. So its natural that you would have a drive that has the same files on the disk as the disk drive. the reason they do this is so that you still have access to the files while using other disks, which was necessary when everything used to come on floppies. so, one of your drives is a ram drive, one of your drives is a floppy, one is a cd, and one is a hard drive. and it is possible that the drive quit, and that was one of the reasons for so many errors besides the fact that she deleted alot of stuff.