386 desktop not booting to DOS

Someone brought me 2 computers that were destined for the landfill to see if I could salvage anything from them. Both of them work (one is a 386, one is a 486) so I decided to see if I could resurrect them into something that someone could get some use out of. The 386 has a 42MB HDD that I removed, wiped and reformatted. I then installed MS-DOS 6.22 and rebooted. The system will boot fine to a floppy but not to the hard drive. When I boot to a Win98 floppy, I can see that drive C: contains the DOS directory.

I thought maybe the partition wasn't active, but I checked via FDISK - it has one 42MB partition, active, and formatted to FAT16 (is that the issue?) I'm betting that the solution is something simple that is lost in my foggy memory banks.

Thanks for any help you can offer in keeping this classic working a bit longer.

Boot to floppy and do a sys C:

If you type this from A: drive and you have a formatted drive, this would copy the system files to that disk making that C:\ bootable.

Sys is used to copy the system files from one drive to another drive, allowing that drive to be bootable.

When running sys, the below files will be copied.

command.com
io.sys
msdos.sys
drvspace.bin

Thanks for the reply. I installed MS-DOS 6.22 on the 486 and it booted fine... I'll try "sys C:" on the 386 tomorrow and post back.

Very odd... I deleted the DOS and startup files, did sys C: from my Win98 floppy, rebooted and it worked fine. So... I deleted all that, reinstalled MS-DOS 6.22 and it took the second time - the system now boots fine to DOS on the C: drive.

Thanks!

Thanks for posting your work around. :D