Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sjsca4!molehill!poffen
From: poffen@molehill (Russ Poffenberger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: puzzler
Message-ID: <1989Dec11.183111.9184@sj.ate.slb.com>
Date: 11 Dec 89 18:31:11 GMT
References: <9214@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: poffen@molehill.UUCP (Russ Poffenberger)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Schlumberger ATE, San Jose, CA
Lines: 44

In article <9214@hoptoad.uucp> shell@hoptoad.UUCP (Shelly Culbertson) writes:
>I first posted yesterday about my machine's refusal to boot from the hard
>disk.  This is a continuation of that situation.
>
>First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who sent me mail in an attempt
>to help.  I've received some very well thought out, complex and articulate
>replies.  I'm really touched by the way busy net-reading professionals are
>willing to go out of their way to give advice to a novice who all of them
>(except for one) have never met.  I mean this sincerely!
>
>The most common advice I received was, boot with the DOS disk in drive A,
>then run "sys c:".  The problem with this is, I get an error message:
>"No room for system on destination drive".  All of my old system files
>are still there on the hard disk, and it won't let me delete them prior
>to trying to replace them: "Error: io.sys (or msdos.sys) is read only".
>
>Sometimes now instead of the cursor just hanging forlornly in space when I 
>attempt to boot from drive C, I get the message "non-system disk or disk
>error".  I guess this is an improvement: at least it's telling me
>*something*.
>
>I guess I'll try to find Spinrite next, as someone suggested.
>Any other ideas?
>Thanks again.
>
>Shelly Culbertson	shell@hoptoad.UUCP 	voice: (707) 839-2265
>
>"Fax me a donut!" -- Phil Spector
>
>On second thought, don't fax me that donut...might get my modem-to-fax
>connections all sticky....


If all else fails, since you can read the disk (I think), you might have to
back up all data on the disk, r-fdisk it and then re-sys it and then restore
all the files. I have seen sys fail when the boot tracks are trashed or other
nasty things like that.

Russ
Russ Poffenberger               DOMAIN: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com
Schlumberger Technologies       UUCP:   {uunet,decwrl,amdahl}!sjsca4!poffen
1601 Technology Drive		CIS:	72401,276
San Jose, Ca. 95110
(408)437-5254