How do I recover from the deltree command?

Hi! I'm Lyle Anthony A. Manibog, 17, from Iloilo, Philippines. Here's my problem: I deleted all the components on my hard drive using deltree at startup. After I have deleted everything, I switched off the computer then, turn it on again. After the computer finished searching whatsoever, a message appeared in the screen: "Invalid hard disk, Pls. replace the disk." I couldn't run my computer anymore. I hope you could help me with my problem.

This question was answered on April 24, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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Well Lyle the good news is that your computer isn't doing anything abnormal The bad news is, it sounds like you deleted the programs and data on your hard drive This would include your operating system and any programs or files that you had stored there Part of that data is what is called your boot sector which is at the begining of everything stored on your hard drive It's this area that keeps track of where everything is, what operating system you are using, and where the programs are that will allow you to boot to your hard drive

Your goal from here would be to reinstall your operating system, and in order to do that you will need to have a full version Windows 98 CD-Rom and be able to ACCESS your CD-Rom to use it The problem is, currently your hard drive is not bootable

As long as your floppy drive is functioning you should be able to use what's called a "boot floppy" to get past the error message that you have currently and allow you access to your hard drive via your floppy A Boot Floppy contains the essential files to set up a simple Dos environment on your A:\ drive (which is the default designation for a floppy drive) and other important programs like Format, Fdisk and Edit Once you have formatted and partitioned your hard drive, you can transfer those essential files to your C:\ drive (hard drive) by using the Copy A: /s C: command

A good boot floppy will also have the basic drivers for a cd-rom device The file you will want to have would be MSCDEX.exe Once it's been coppied to your hard drive, you would run it by entering mscdex and hitting enter

There is a great deal more that can be said regarding the HD installation process I suggest for any of this work you will want to locate someone who has done a hard drive installation before to help guide you through the process efffectively.

Thank you for your question...

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Posted by Michael of Chandler-Gilbert Community College on April 24, 2001

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