Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > PC formatting help please boffins??

[Guido]

Been given a PC by a mate that I can use for dumping my photos on and as a drone workstation if I get to the stage of displaying/selling my pics trackside at race meetings/trackdays.

It had Win98 on it and a whole heap of junk. As I wanted a completely clean starting point, I carried out a format of the hard drive via DOS.

I wanted to reinstall using Win2k (the PC is not powerful enough to install XP) so insterted in CD in the drive after formatting and started up the machine - I had reset the BIOS to command the PC to boot from CD first then floppy.

Here's my problem.........

Now when I start the PC, the CD-ROM light illuminates and stays on. However, I can't hear the CD drive spinning as you normally would.

As the PC tries to boot it comes up with the message: "Invalid System disk, bla, bla, bla"

I know the CD is bootable as I used it 2 weeks ago to reinstall the O/S on my boss's work computer from DOS. I just formated the drive and Windows setup started as soon as I started up the PC with the CD in.

I can only assume there's a problem with the CD-drive on the PC in that it's not reading the disks.

I then created the 4-set bootdisk set via DOS and the Win2K installation CD. Starting setup from the 4 floppy disks (typically ) fails on the 4th disk with the error "Filename fastfat.sys is corrupted".

This happens with internet-forum created bootdisks and the Win2K CD-rom created bookdisks.

Help please ............

What can I do to get an O/S back onto the machine???? Do I really have to buy a new CD rom drive for an antique machine which may not be recognised anyway as there's no O/S in place?

Thanks in advance for any help.