Hi,
I was given a Compaq Armada 7770DMT with no support disks or manual. It has a 2.9G hard drive and 32M of memory, a floppy and a CDROM that are interchangeable. When I start the computer it counts the RAM and then displays "NTLDR is missing. hit ctr-alt-del to restart". I was told that Win95 was on it and had thought that it was partitioned and formatted to erase company info. From what I have found so far, the error indicats that Windows NT, 2000 or XP was loaded on it and some files are missing, the hard drive is not partitioned correctly or that it can't access the hard drive (I can't get the C: prompt at all). I've tried three disks to start a fresh install process. The Compaq BIOS boot disk (sp9972), the computer setup disk (sp9962) for (Win 95 and 98 ) and a Win98 startup disk. I got the same results with all three. The Win98 startup disk said the C drive does not contain valid FAT or FAT 32 partitions. I then chose #1 to create DOS partition, #1 to create primary DOS partition and got "current fixed drive :1", "no space to create a DOS partition". I then chose to "delete primary DOS partition" and got "no primary DOS partition to delete". The partition info is as follows Partition-1, Status-A, Type-NTFS, Volume label-blank, Mbytes-29373, System usage-100%. I'm not sure why it says there is no partition and then labels one. It then say to use the PC diagnostic disk to create partition. I don't have that disk and every link I've found ends in "no longer available or supported".
Since the partition type came up NTSF, do I need to use a NTFS boot disk to solve this problem? Will the disk let change the partition back to a DOS partition and then let me install Win95 or 98SE?
Sorry this was wordy, but I wanted to give as much info as possible. Also, I hope this is the right forum. I didn't know if this should have been posted to Win95.
Many thanks in advance.

Jonathan

You are right that NTLDR is an NT and up file.

From the DOS bootdisk load FDISK if it is on there and pick option 4 to view the partition information. It is likely that the partition is non-standard and thus you can't use the delete primary partition. You should then be able to create your new one and re-install 95 or 98 as per your choice.

An alternative is to gamble and boot from an XP CD and repair the install. If that doesn't work try a 2k CD and so on .....

However, by far the easiest would be to install a new OS over the top and allow it to format the drive for you, etc ...


The diagnostic disc will create what Compaq referred to as their "diagnostic partition" - usually a %age of the drive is set aside for system diagnotic tools much like modern system builders have a recovery section on your hard drive so I wouldn't concern yourself too much about this - besides diags can be run from the floppy anyway.

Thanks for the quick reply. Which DOS bootdisk do I need to use? The NTFS one? I thought I tried all the options for fdisk on the three disks I tried and none of them let me start a new install.

Finally got the problem solved. The NTFS was in the "non DOS partition" which after deleting it, enabled me to partition it and then format. I was able to use a Win95/98 boot disk to do it.

Thanks for the tip etoad.

Marked as Resolved

Thanks for letting us know Jonathan.