Missing OS

[AltaWolf]

Hello there, I have an old computer that someone ran a format on, and without fdisk. Now, it gives me an error message:
Drive Not Ready Error.

It wont boot off of a DOS floppy, nor a startup disk for Win98.
Any ideas?

[AlaricD]

You don't really need to run FDISK every time you intend to FORMAT, unless you want to change the size of your partitions, or if the drive had never been FDISKed before, or if the drive were using a filesystem like HPFS, NTFS, or other non-DOS filesystems and you wish to correct that.

What the person before you should have done was done a FORMAT /S or, after formatting was complete, done a SYS C: .

You may need to check the BIOS setup to see if the floppy drive is enabled, so that you can boot from floppy. If the BIOS shows the correct drive type already, perhaps the drive is dirty, misaligned, or just plain broken.

Another thing you could do is put the hard drive into a different computer, and then SYS the drive, and put it back in the original computer.

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Am386DX-40 + Cx387DX-40
32MB, 128KB cache
(2) 540MB HD's
8x CD
2MB Video
SB16 PnP
DR-DOS 7.04
Win3.11 w/ Win32s
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Just because it's unusual doesn't make it a virus!
Ping is NOT an acronym!

[This message has been edited by AlaricD (edited 04-14-2002).]

[steppenwolf]

it also has to be set up in bios to boot from a , if they switched it to boot from c then theres a problem , it can easyly be switched back

also if its an old computer it probably needs a new battery

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"teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime;feed him fishsticks- be sure to have tartar sauce"