No hard drive boot when restoring Presario 633 (486SX system)[Resolved]

I'm trying to restore a Presario 486 SX-33 system. I added a 250 MB Conner CP30251 hard drive and reformatted it to FAT16 using this machine. Then I booted to my Win98 master boot disk to get the system going. The hard drive was automagically recognized as a Type 1 disc and I began to install DOS 6.2. The install went fine. When I rebooted, I got a "non system or disk error" message. I inserted my boot diskette, pressed the ANY key :-) and all was well. I decided to try and run Win 3.1 install and, again, everything installed without a hitch. I rebooted and once again got the "non system or disk error" message.

I checked the BIOS/setup - diskette boot was enabled, obviously. I wondered if maybe a system this old didn't have the option of defaulting to C: if there was no diskette, so I disabled the diskette book and rebooted. I got a flashing cursor for 8-10 seconds, then the "non system or disk error" message yet again.

When I boot to my master floppy and do <dir c:>, I see command.com, autoexec.bat, config.sys, a DOS directory - everything I would expect to find. The hard drive is setup correctly both in setup and as drive C: when I boot successfully via floppy.

This has got me bumfuzzled. It's not the end of the world, but I was trying to get this system set up as a machine to play old DOS and Windows games. Any pointers or ideas would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Sounds like the boot partition is not set as "A"ctive. Load FDISK and select "[2] Set active partition" to see. If it's not set, set it, exit FDISK and then try booting from the hard drive again.

After I posted, I thought of the same thing. I thought I had set it as active when I FDISKed to start with and, as it turns out, I had. Just now, I tried to set it as active again, in case the manual selection might make some difference. I was told that it was ALREADY active, thank you very much.

Thanks for the thought though. I'm out of ideas.

It sounds like you copied the diskette to hard drive to get the system files, but did you do a SYS C: from the boot diskette to transfer the IO.SYS and other hidden files?

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Then I booted to my Win98 master boot disk to get the system going. The hard drive was automagically recognized as a Type 1 disc and I began to install DOS 6.2. The install went fine

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Did you boot with DOS disk one which is the proper way to install the operating system or did you install it from the prompt?
Is the hard drive set as one of the boot devices in the bios?
BTW check you dont have a network card or similar enabled as a boot device.

Just wanted to post an update with the solution, in case it helps anyone searching in the future. Thanks for all the helpful pointers. As it turns out, the Presarios work best w/ the hard drive set to cable select - the Conner drive didn't have a CS setting that I could find. I tried a WD 540 that had a CS jumper setting and reinstalled DOS and Windows as before - the system booted to the hard drive just like it should. :)

Glad you have it sorted :D