compaq 4120 ntldr is missing after format

[Gary Nasato]

I had formated a compaq 4120 hard drive to reload windows 98 now when the computer boots up it wont accept the 98 bootup disk,at this point in time the message that come up is NTLDR is missing, what do i have to do to load Windows 98 on this computer.

[Ronald Postma]

Hi Gary,
This is propebly not an original Win98 bootdisk? and propably has been formatted once in an system that was formatted as NTFS, like Win2000 or XP. Then this situation may accour.
IF you have another system with win98, do a full format (not quick) and make the bootdisk again.

I presume you have a Win98Cd to install the OS, you can also boot from CD and start setup there, you have to set the CD-rom to first boot in the Bios if that does not work.

HTH,
Ronald

[Perignon]

Hi Gary,

Ronald is right, reverting from NTSF to FAT32 is a pre-condition to installing Win98.

If XP or W2K were installed previously with NTSF option, there is no much you can do but delete these partitions. Magic Partition can do that. FDISK can do that as well, but the price to pay is that all files will disappear.

You should get under a MS-DOS session to run FDISK (I believe option 5 can delete all partitions one by one). Best way is to procede from a boot-disk containing MS-DOS system utilities and a generic driver for the CDROM (Win98 "restart-floppy" for example).

Once all former partitions are deleted, you'll have to run FDISK again under option 1 in order to apply one single partition to the whole disk. Then FORMAT C:
Finally insert Win98 CD (D: drive by default), move from A> to D: and type SETUP (or INSTALL, depending on the language utilised).

Alain.