Wednesday, January 15, 2003 - Wed, 15 Jan 2003

Let’s get rid of that EZ-BIOS. It’s not in the Startup files. How to do it? I go to Western Digital’s website and find instructions on removing it. I have to use the disk that they supplied. Put the disk in, reboot. It says: “Starting Caldera DR-DOS… Can’t load BDOS kernal file A:IBMDOS.COM. System Halted.” What is wrong? This worked on Sunday. Reboot. Put disk in to check what’s on it and I get a “Read Fault error reading Drive A”. Do a Scandisk of the A drive (have you ever done this to a floppy?) and it takes an hour to complete. Finally it says: “Scandisk found errors on this drive and fixed them all.” I go to the Scandisk log file and see that it “Partially corrected” 36 sectors. Not good. I guess somehow the disk got damaged.

Reboot. Back to the Western Digital website. Download their utility disk. Load it on a floppy. Reboot. Now it says “Cannot Load DOS - press any key to retry”. Restart. Use a new diskette and make it a system disk that will work on my computer with the “SYS A:” command. Copy the other files from the new utilities disk to it. Of course, they now do not all fit so I have to split them into two diskettes. Finally, after much prodding, I got the correct utility to start up and remove the EZ-BIOS.

Reboot (number 30 today) and I get again: “Sector not found reading drive C” and following that the machine freezes. Startup with DOS. My USER.DAT file was only 65 KB long (it should have been over 2 MB.) Delete it and the SYSTEM.DAT files and Windows should get the previous ones. Reboot. Now it starts. One more Scandisk look okay. I work on the machine for awhile with no problems. Almost everything looks okay now, except: where are my registry SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT files? They are not in c:windows.