How do I reformat a hard drive and reinstall 95 or 2k on a Packard Bell VAR R 500? It's only booting to floppy

Answer 1

Go into the system BIOS, and change the boot order to allow the CD-Rom to boot first. Be sure to save changes before exiting! Place the Win2K CD in your CD drive, and restart the computer. The PC will boot from CD and then follow the necessary steps to format and re-install Windows.

Answer 2

You need to go into the BIOS of the machine (sometimes its done by f2, f12, esc, f10; it all depends on the system) at start up and it should have an option for the boot devices (ie, floppy, hard drive, then cd) which you can rearrange. One thing to keep in mind, since its a packard bell it may not have cd rom natively so you may need to put it on the IDE bus (the hard drive is IDE too) and might have to use the HD option as primary to force the cd rom to boot. Another approach that you can try if all else fails is using a win 98/win ME boot floppy which has cd rom support. Many of these images are available online (yup, free) and work like a charm in most cases. If all the above fails you might want to do a network install in which case you'll need an ethernet card that can do so but that's a whole other essay. Good luck.

Answer 3

I can't find any details of this machine on Packard Bells site, so why not contact them on:
http://www.packardbell.com/contactus.html

This gives details of the method:
http://www.webtechgeek.com/How-to-Format-a-Hard-Drive.htm

You could also take out the HD and plug it into the spare slot of a working machine and format it there. This is often the easiest way, before returning it to your machine. This should also show you if the HD is fried or is useable.

You may be able to reformat the HD from your bios.
If your machine has a CD and it can be set to autoboot from CD in the bios, you can go to here:
http://help.linspire.com/cgi-bin/linspire.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1280&p_li=

Why am I pointing you at a linux site? This will let you download a stand alone Linux system which runs straight from the CD with no HD system needed. If this runs on your machine you should be ably to format the hard drive from this and then reload windows once you've sorted out the HD. However, if you use your machine mainly for office stuff or web surfing, you might find you like Linspire so either purchase that or load Fedora on. You can download Fedora for free from here:
http://fedora.redhat.com/

Be warned: it's 5 cds but it's a full system and looks and feels like windows, but without some of the bugs and should be quick on your machine. Do not try to dual boot it with windows though unless you know what you're doing.

Sorry this isn't too specific but good luck!

Answer 4

find a copy of windows 98se oem. put it in the disk drive re boot . follow the prompts after it formats your hard drive .you can put 95-98-98se-me on it. if it wont boot from cd then borrow their start up floppy also.

Answer 5

You have to boot with a floppy that has your CDrom drivers to access the windows CD.

Answer 6

Boot from the floppy and use the option (setup from CD) it to "activate" the Cd-rom and then by using DOS commands format and then open the setup.exe from the CD-rom and you can start installing.

Answer 7

repartition hard drive by choosing fdisk after you boot with a WIN98 STARTUP DISK .After you repartition you must restart your computer. Choose "start with cd rom support" then type "format c:" from the A: prompt .After the format switch from A: prompt to D: prompt and type setup.exe

Answer 8

How about
format c:
when you boot into floppy?

Answer 9

make a start up disk

and boot with it

them format