argh, i don't know if this is fixable

thermophilis

thermophilis

Member
okay, so one of my older computers has...stopped working. It runs 98se and whenever i turn it on, it shows the windows loading screen, but then it says "GDI.EXE missing, must re-install windows." So I popped in the recovery cd that came with it, and it says "I/O read error." I've tried it on two cd drives, but neither worked. I tried using a boot disk and it says "command.com missing." I've tried safe mode and it comes up with a screen that says "It is now safe to turn off your computer." Now I don't really need this computer...but i kinda like having it around to play with...anybody have any ideas, i'm willing to do anything really, as long as i don't have to spend money.
-thanks
 
you could take out the HD and format it in fat32.
reset the motherboard; I forgot how to do that in old computers
I think u need to unplug power supply and take out the battery for several hours or a day. if you have a manual for mobo it should tell hot to reset bios.

try hitting del or f8 or whatever to get to bios. and see if your hd, cd rom
is seen.

other than that you can cell it to used store. I have small store owned
by old man. he bought nvidia fx 5500 from me for 40$ ... crazy man.
and my apevia psu for 40$. I bought the psu on newegg for 30$. it wasn't stable. so I got rid of it and use old psu until my xcio arives.
 
okay, how do i format the harddrives in fat32? Also, the computer has been sitting in my attic for about a year. The hdds and the cd drives are all recognized by the BIOS
 
I don't remember which file system win98 uses
if it's ntfs than it does not matter how u format it.
so u can take out the HD and plug it in to your other computer
right click on this HD on my computer --> format--> chose
fat 32. again formating your HD should not matter. when
all last fails you can format your HD on different computer.

but it should not matter. make sure u reset your bios by taking out the
battery and unpluging PSU. I think you need boot disk when installing win 98.
and in bios make sure your boot sequence is
1)floppy
2)cdrom
3)HD
 
DOS systems use FAT32 as NTFS is only available on versions of Windows based around the 'New Technologies' envirionment, if it indeed will not format on the machine it lives in, set it to a slave drive and hook it up, then format it in XP as that can handle the old file structure, USB drives still use this technology.
 
well, i formatted the drives, popped the installation cd for window in with the boot disk...and nothing....oh well, it's not worth it to upgrade, but i've thought about putting linux on it. It's pretty crappy, 80mb ram and the CPU is 600mhz celeron. The only problem is, i have no idea how i would go about doing this. Can anybody help with that?
 
you forgot the most important thing: to flash bios.
I used to do it by taking out the battery and unpluging power cord for
a day. just to make sure
 
actually, i just plugged the hdd's into this computer and tried to run it that way, while i had the mobo from the old one sitting unplugged w/o the battery all day...still didn't work
 
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