here is my problem, I have a old pc I formated .. had the windows cd and every thing.. well I went playing around in dos, big mistake at
a:\ I typed in fdisk thinking duel boot system.. I didn't reformate after that just made a dos partition and now I can't get in C:\ to get into windows. get media devise error.when I reboot with startup disk and do fdisk it gives me 4 choices . can I use one of these delete partitions with out losing C drive and having to reload windows. cd was broken yesterday, was a bad day

Thanks Terri

Hey terrib714,

Welcome to PCHF.

What exactly did you do when you first went into fdisk? When you came out of fdisk, did it ask you to reboot?

There not much you can do in fdisk without losing your windows partition, but it sounds like it's already lost?

If you deleted the primary dos partition as shown here; Google Image Result for http://www.logan.eclipse.co.uk/images/crpripar.gif
in the 4th screen then C: is history.

I wanted to check the what dive the cd rom was in, even tho I loaded drivers and checked as it drive it was ( E) when Itried to use cd.. siad it was there.. that is why I went back to dos.. to see if I could check it out. I'm not good with dos, I'm sitting here with about 6 books, none tell me what to do now that I have the partition, I didn't format again, when I change to C drive I use commands and dir or windows it says invalid media, but when I type verision (ver) it says windows 95 I did reformat and loaded win 98.. so not even sure why it says 95. I just want to know if I can go to the fdisk choices and select one of the delate partition and not have to relaod .. and which one(s) in which order..

OMG... I sent last reply with out looking at what I wrote.. lot of typos. hope you can understand it

Invalid media can only mean one of three things. Either the drive hasn't been formatted correctly. A partition has been created, but not formatted. Or the hard drive itself is bad. In all cases, the your windows parition would be already lost. You will probably need to reformat the drive.

You can try using the command: fdisk /mbr which will sort out any problems with you master boot record.