I have a customer's computer....it is a Gateway with a PIII 450, 12 gig HD, 128 meg of Ram, with win98SE. When I first got into it at the customer's house, it was giving the message that windows was having trouble accessing the registry and it would try to repair the problem. It rebooted and went into the registry repair utility, but would not boot to windows. It would go into the registry repair utility every time it rebooted. So I told her I would do a reinstall of win98 and I took it to the shop. I booted it with a 98 boot disk, went into fdisk and looked at the partitions. I was surprised....it showed one 12 gig partition, but it was a non-dos partition. I have never seen that happened before. How does a primary, active, dos partition, become non-dos without user intervention? I might add that I had also done an antivirus scan and found nothing....as I suspected a virus might have been causing the registry access problem? This computer has a number of other problems and I still have it in the shop. I have a several ideas, but would like input from you all before trying other repair options.

Thanks for your input.

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did this box feature a dual boot configuration at some point? THat could explain the non-dos partition...

I guess it is time for the good ole fdisk /mbr trick

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Frank.....thanks for your input. It never had dual boot option. I tried the fdisk /mbr before looking at the partitions. I don't remember exactly what message it gave me after doing it, but it didn't help...still wouldn't boot. Also, it was the entire 12 gig HD that was listed as 1 non-dos partition.

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oops....Freak.....not Frank....sorry

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no problemo Frank is a lovely name as well

Try partition magic and see what it detects that partition as...

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A few things that I have ran into that cause non-DOS partitions:


*Corrupt FAT or MBR

*Dynamic drive overlay installed on the hard drive. (Such as EZBIOS, Ontrack, or Disk Manager)

*When booting from Windows 95A or any version of DOS, FAT 32 partitions will appear as NON DOS partitions.

*Virus

*Hard Drive has been compressed

Just some info, hope it helps.

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Last edited by Teck Shark on 04-17-02 at 04:56 PM

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great post! I bet one of those is the issue at hand..

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Point of last resort -----> Buy a new HD had to put this one on as a joke

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Is it because the partition is in FAT32? I think DOS cannot recognize FAT32.

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A little more information about this computer: I have reinstalled win98SE three times, and each time, it has issues. After one installation, it seemed to be running fine, but when I installed IE 6.0, about half way thru the install, it gave me error messages that an install (cab) file was missing or corrupted. After another installation, it wouldn't run defrag because there were errors, and when I ran scandisk, it said it found errors and fixed them all. But I ran scandisk 6 times, and it told me the same thing each time, and still wouldn't run defrag. After the last installation (last night about midnight), it gave me the message it had given when I first saw it....that windows was having trouble accessing the registry. I also ran a surface scan and it reported no errors.

My best guess is that the hard disk has some bad sectors (in spite of the negative surface scan) that are failing intermittantly. My next step, with the customer's approval, will be to replace the HD. But if any of you have any other suggestions or input, I would welcome it.

I thank you all for your responses.

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