dandnsmith

It certainly sounds like there are some basic problems to be addressed. 1. I wouldn't do anything about formatting the HDD until you have found what the problem is with floppy and CD drives. To this end - has the PC been the subject of partial dismantling before this happened? I ask because the floppy (and CD) drives can be disabled by putting the drive ribbon cables in the wrong way round - the floppy light coming on and the floppy searching is typical behaviour when this has been done. 2. When (1) is sorted, then alter the boot sequence and get hold of an independently verified bootable CD to see if you can boot from it. I have a non-bootable 98SE CD which caused me a bit of hassle recently until I constructed a bootable version using info from these forums (this bypassed the need for a bootable floppy). 3. If now you're really convinced that floppy drive and/or CD drive is defunct, then you could replace them - they're not too expensive these days once you have a source. 4. Once you've got past those steps, you can check whether the 98 CD is really bootable, and then go to things like repairing the system - you might just find that it has already fixed itself (there's nothing quite like non-working devices to mess things up at boot time). Looking forward to the next part of the saga.

As to how to get the sharing to work with XP and 98SE, it may depend on whether you have XP Home or XP Pro (the facilities are different) as to how you configure them. I have it working between WinMe Win98SE XP Home and XP pro. One worthwhile comment is that the workgroup names should be the same, and any shares created before a change to the workgroup name in XP are likely not to work (cannot think how many systems I've sorted because of this, little publicised, Msoft feature). I have a number of these pendrives, which all work under XP for hot plugging, and the support for Win9x isn't quite so good, with special drivers and so on sometimes being needed.

I assume that this refers to a Compaq/HP PC. These, and others, often have a customised BIOS which is used for the particular motherboard series. It looks like the PC is sufficiently old in design to mean that you need to get the full details (which it looks like you have) and chase the HP or phoenix sited to see if they have bios/updates which go back that far. Have you any idea whether it is flashable or not (seems doubtful to me). If it isn't, then you may need to go to a specialist to get round the preparation of a new BIOS chip (is it soldered in?). I had one system which I added an adaptec controller with its own IDE chipset, and could so cope with larger HDDs. What sort of mobo is it (as far as addon slots is concerned)?

I seem to remember that I used a tool which remapped bad sectors some years back, but not whether it was a manufacturers product geared to the individual disk type. Also in my memory is something which said that newer disks were doing the remapping automatically, up to the limit which the manufacturer provided for. I think, then, that what you may need to do is alter the FAT chain(s) which currently point(s) to the offending sector(s) and then construct a new chain which includes all those you don't want used and mark them not-to-be-used. Do I know how to do this? Not at present - I'd have to go on a hunt for suitable tools to do the job of those on the now defunct system.

Looking at the CPU speed, he could be up against the timing loop problem which gets reported as an NDIS failure. The 1GB would (judging from other postings) probably be taken in its stride.

One thing it cannot be is the basic ability of XP to cope with FAT filestructures. I have systems with XP installed on both NTFS and FAT, and the system I'm working on now, while based on NTFS, has no-problem access to multiple FAT based filesystems on the same machine. I've heard of oddities connected with USB drives (where we're talking about the little sticks, not conventional drives in USB enclosures) - and these seem to manufacturer-linked. It has been said that some must be formatted as FAT16 or FAT12 as FAT32 doesn't work! I don't know how to progress from here, alas.

So, what exactly are we talking about here when you say 'DVD player'? This could mean all sorts of things, including various software products and standalone products. The dates on files are 'date created' date last modified' and 'date last accessed' - the way Windows Explorer sees these can be somewhat confused, depending in what order you do things, and so does the way other software lists them (as I know from things like Irfanview, which has hidden order influences). The very least you can do is to change the recorded dates in the file structure, and then reboot - just to ensure there is something like a consistent view, and there is no hidden caching of info.

Sharon - sounds like you've gone a bit too far for the best recovery strategy, as you're writing more files over recovered space. I seem to remember, on one occasion, using a recovery CD (linux based) which would recover the FAT using the fact that there is a secondary copy which (strangely enough) Windows doesn't use to recover from. It sounds like you had a problem some way down the FAT chain, and that is how you lost so much at one go. I'll really have to dig out my rarely used tools and have another look at capabilities - UBSD and System Recovery CD come first to mind, but I think I have others, such as Recovery Is Possible. Since you can boot these independently, and write info to various destinations, without compromising the original filesystem, they offer a good chance of recovery.

I don't know how you 'lose' 250MB of the OS, except via a HDD going bad. I'd go with the suggestion to get the data backed up as fast as possible (linux is a good tool, if you can use it) and work out what to do next - you could even consider using the recovery CD, since you'll lose the software anyway if you blitz the windows directory.

The message strongly suggests DNS - after all the smtp service cannot deliver if it tries to connect to an unknown address which is what it is telling you. For more help, I think you'd need to post more detail - can you exercise the environment, and test out the DNS apart from the Exchange server stuff?

Hi - Derek here This looks like a really friendly and informed forum.