W95: TGSHell hell and now "no system disk"

[Ogg]

I'm posting this plea for help on behalf of a friend...

"Got an error message for TGShell and Kernel32dll. In the reboot I got as far as "invalid system disk, replace and..... The cdrom is not connected (it's been having issues), the floppy drive works fine, so the only disk left is the hard drive. The only reason I care is all the work we did on family research, I hope it isn't lost.

Then he tried W95 and W95B bootdisks...

"I know there is a safe mode here. Anyhow, the boot gets as far as Loading Boot Record from IDE...OK, then the blasted invalid message. I set the floppy as 1st boot also,with a boot disk, same thing...Loading Boot Record from floppy..OK, then invalid system disk etc. etc. No A prompt, no C prompt, no nuthin' ! I only have access to setup prior to that. "

Meanwhile.. he swapped hdd's inorder to see if ANY hdd will boot; that worked - so it confirms that the mobo and IDE cable are ok. Does anyone have any other suggestions on this matter? Even if he's unable to load W95, he just needs to access the C drive long enough to copy the family-tree files to floppy. I find it odd that even W95B bootdisk is not cooprating to take us to A prompt.

 

[Triton]

Remove the hard drive and set its jumpers to SLAVE.
Install it on a working system as a non bootable 2nd hard drive.
Backup the files you need.

Look at the entries for "TGShell" and "Tgcmd" at this link;
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist_t.htm

Small excerpt; TGSHELL.exe (Tioga Software / Support.com)
"Absolutely nightmarish software which eats up CPU, drives the hard disk hard, causes boot-up Kernel32 errors, generates illegal operations, invalid page faults, and much more. De-install as per instructions for TGCMD above."

If the drive works as a slave and your able to backup your files I would erase the master boot record and do a fresh operating system install.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Rather than reinstall, try first to boot from a W95/W98 bootfloppy again, then after the A:\> prompt type in fdisk /mbr and hit enter.
This rewrites the MasterBootRecord MBR.

To be sure you have working bootfloppies, go to www.bootdisk.com and download the repective file(s). Doubleclick the file(s) after download, and have a fresh floppy ready. Those programs create fresh floppies.