How do I create a MS-dos boot partition on a wiped hard drive?

Question

Long story short I formatted my hard drive because the operating system (windows 95) got messed up, after booting from the boot disk I go onto the win95 install CD and run setup. then it says "cannot create temporary directory. If you have HPFS or NTFS installed on your hard drive you will have to create a MS-DOS boot partition to set up windows

I just got the dos partition up, but now its saying "setup requires 7340032 bytes available on drive c:" its a 13 gig hard drive with nothing on it, any idea why setup is saying that?

never mind

Answer 1

Boot from the boot disk and at the dos prompt type in "fdisk /mbr". This will put a fresh copy of the master boot record on the hard drive. Then format the hard drive with a command "format c: /s". This will format the hard drive and make it bootable. You can run fdisk and see if the primary partition is bootable, but if you didn't totally erase the hard drive with something like dban, it should be intact.

GL.

Answer 2

Run Fdisk from your Win95 boot floppy. Delete the current partiton. Re-boot your computer with the Win 95 boot floppy and create a FAT32 partition. Set it as the Primary partition if you create two patitions or Fdisk does not do it at creation.
HPFS ia an obsolete format and NTFS is used for NT, Win 2000, and XP.


Here is a site you can download a fresh copy of the 95 boot disk.

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Answer 3

I believe windows has a disc management utility build into it. I would try to click start button then "run..." then type "diskmgmt.msc" with out the " marks....then you can probably reformat the linux partition. this will allow windows to recognize the partition that was once set aside for the linux install. you might be able to delete all the data fromt he linux partition and change it to a blank one that windows can recognize. merging partitions is a bit more tricky to do than simply formatting existing ones..... you may want to try a 3rd party partitioning program. I use partition wizard myself.. as far as your back up discs and what they offer in terms of changing partitions back to the original configuration Ive never used them before. A genuine stand alone windows disc will allow you to change them to be exactly as you want them, during the install, and will remove linux from your drive like a piece of cancer if you wish.

Answer 4

You need a set of Dos diskettes to create the partition. You can probably also download something useable from various web sites.