Windows 95

I dug up an old laptop I had and which I've done something to in the past. It  ran on windows 95 and that is all I can tell you. Now, it won't even boot up windows because it won't even recognize the hard-drive. At first, I thought it was just a problem with a corrupt command.com, but now when I get to the floppy prompt and try to do a 'scandisk c:' it won't even recognize the harddrive. however I'm able to use fdisk to know it's still there (/dev/hda1). All I keep getting is invalid drive specification. So, can anyone help me?

the "invalid drive specification" will appear if you attempt to reference a drive letter that has not yet been assigned by dos.

dos does not assign letters to drives that have unknown filesystems or bad partition table info.

if you are using an actual dos boot disk (as opposed to win95 bootdisk or winME bootdisk), remember that true dos does not recognize fat32, which may be the filesystem on disk.  try getting a winME bootdisk and see if your drive comes up.

if that fails, the partition table information may be bad.  you can try seeing if there is a free bootfloppy-based util that lets you rewrite your partition table.

if not, something probably had a free-for-all on the disk and you will have to reformat.

the harddrive could also be done for.  they don't live forever.

The laptop's done for and I have no interest in keeping it no fixing it. So now, what do you suggest I do with the carcass? Should I smash it, donate it to goodwill, or try to sell parts on ebay? If I smash it, I get the rare satisfaction of smashing expensive shit (it was free to me, if that's a factor), donating it to goodwill (i'm good-hearted sorta), or selling parts on ebay. It's an old old laptop so I'm thinking nobody would have a use for it, but you never know.. Suggestions?

drink the liquid crystal.  post pics

Good Will does not take computer hardware in my area. If this is the case for yours, smash it, burn it, blow it up...