hard drive problem

[Mr. Rogers]

i have this 60 gig hard drive I am trying to use for this computer. i erased it
and partitioned it with FDISK into two 30 gig partitions. then i used my restore cd to reinstall windows, and it finished, and when i restart it says "invalid operating system" or something. I don't think it is deleting everything either, because i had norton ghost installed on it before i erased it and ghost will still pop up. so right now i am trying to get rid of all the junk on there for good by wiping the hard drive with one of those programs that just covers everything randomly. hopefully that will work. anyone know whats goin on?

[shooraijin]

This is a silly question, but which partition did you install Windows on? Did you have a bootloader set up to pick which one to boot from, like LILO or something like that?

[Mr. Rogers]

This is a silly question, but which partition did you install Windows on? Did you have a bootloader set up to pick which one to boot from, like LILO or something like that?

nope, no bootloader. both partitions are blank.

[Mithrandir]

Hmm. I think what shooby is getting at is that there may be something in the MBR. Have you tried booting from the Cd and doing an "fdisk /mbr" to rebuild it? (Don't know if it will even work on your version of Windoze, acutally). Speaking of which... What version is it? Also... Probably a silly question, but did you:
1. fdisk
2. format
3. install windows

Or did you skip step 2, and rely on windows to format it "right" for you system?

Also, do you have any other hard drives in the computer? Is the 60 setup as the master on IDE 0?

[madphilb]

Did you make one of the partitions active? It's been too long since I FDisked something, so I can't remember if FDisk automatically makes one of the partions active or not, but I seem to remember having this problem and done/not done this myself.

Run FDIsk and make sure you have an active partition.

[Mr. Rogers]

its windows 98, i forgot if i made one of the partitions active or not, ill try again and do that. and the other question - yea, i used fdisk then formatted everything, and then installed windows. the restore program formats the drive itself, but its the same as if you go to dos and do the format command. i installed XP on this drive once and it didnt give me any trouble, just 98.