Its been years since i booted a couple of old computers. They belonged to my mother who has passed away. Now I want to read the stories and such she left in them. when i try to boot. two beeps. I run the bios and no hard drive is installed. It wont take any of the fixed choices. choice 47 needs cylinders etc #'s. Can I get the settings from any source? This also happens with a 486 I have. please help also if the battery went dead can i boot anyway?

if you want to get the files off of the hdd's, just take them out and put them in your beos machine. do a bios hdd auto detect, and then save and exit. boot up beos, mount the partitions and copy over the data. this gets the job done. hope this helps Mr X

I'd worry about getting the files off first on another computer..there are older versions of disk manager and such that can enter the correct amount of cylinders and such (the options those machines had were suited to he harddrives of the time only) but these utilities are destructive (i.e. full format is part of the procedure) and you'd lose all your data..if you can find a utility called WDTBLCHK.exe it will list all the particulars, even on non WD drives..but be forewarned that that old box possibly won't accept even the correct settings if the drives too new for it, and you could lose part of the disk still. Definitely, if you have a BeOS machine, follow the above suggestion...

Take the hard drive to a company that works with getting data off of old drives. You might have a MFM or RLR instead of a modern IDE drive even. If you wish to play with it you might seek out info on the hard drive model and make. Many makers still offer old data or you might email them for info. It is important to have the correct numbers if the machine doesn't offer an auto detect. You can wreck the drive with wrong settings.