Defunct

[Tinkersquash]

Defunct

 

[Weird Harold]

I've been running Win2K on my little laptop for the last year and it's much too large an OS but I decided to reformat my harddrive with a fresh installment of Win2K.

Will your laptop boot from a floppy?

If it will, then boot from a windows emergency boot disk -- you can make one on a friend's machine.

From the EBD youcan run the DOS versions of FDISK.EXE and FORMAT.EXE to wipe the harddrive and start from scratch.

Run FDISK /mbr to reset the master boot record.

run FORMAT C: /U to do an unconditional format of the hard drive or FORMAT C: /U /S to do an unconditional format and make it bootable to DOS.

 

[Weird Harold]

I think its time for a professional.

Sounds like a good idea; that or a friend who is good with computers.

If you can boot to DOS from the hard-drive, you can probably edit autoexec.bat to stop it from restarting the setup, but I'm not sure where you'd need to go from there.

Tis is the kind of problem that's usually fairly easy to solve with hands-on, but almost impossible to solve by describing the many possibilities.