I have an old dell 133 my wife uses to play games on, yesterday it quit working and in my ignorance, I deleted the partition. I put in the Win 98 start up disk, but won't recognize it. I put in the Win 95 start up disk and I can get A:\>, but when I try to get C:\ drive, it doesn"t recognize it. The computer boots up to "A Drive installed", but stalls there. Any ideas?

Hard drive failure?

I hope not, but am afraid it might be. I don't remember the exact error message I got at first, but something about mscdex. I thought I might be able to format it and put her games back on. So I managed to get to fdisk and that is where I deleted the partition.

So you have nothing on it, and no way to access or install anything to the hard drive?

I can get to the BIOS setup, I downloaded a boot up disk, when it gets to "boot up with CD support" I click on it. But instead of going to D prompt, it goes to A prompt. I can access C:\ prompt, but when I type format c:/s it doesn't recognize it.

I'm guessing hard drive failure. Try putting a different one as the master and see if it boots.

I agree, but it is the only one I have.

Well, I don't really have another explanation for you other than purchase a new one. It's not like you can install a program to fix it (seeing as you can't even boot up )

Have you run FDISK to create a partition? Can't format a partition that doesn't exist...

Sorry for butting in, as Brundle quite rightly pointed out, with the earlier editions there were certain procedures you had to follow in order to install 9X OS.

Have you done the following?

Deleted Partition by selecting option 4 in the FDISK utility, then you need to select option 1 which will then create an 'ACTIVE' partition.

Once this has been done, you will then be able to format C drive.

When formatting C drive, select 'FULL' format and don't add /q for quick as this won’t show any bad sectors that you may have on the drive where as full format does.
Example:
A:\format c: /q (this formats using quick format)
A:\format c: (without /q this will carry out a full format, if you find it hangs at any point during this process the chances are you HD has died.