I got some old 486's (3 of for FREE), now Im trying to get them to go. The problem is that it will not boot a floppy, the a:drive works, the BOIS looks right. But no booting just a MSG saying non boot or system disk (or something like that), Iv tryed diffrent boot disk (even download boot disk images) but nout'works?8-¬( the hard drive in is complety blank(&fomated) I need help on this as it doing my head in, what I want is to get DOS SHELL 5 on the hard drive then Windows 3.11 AnyO Topz

it might be the floopy drive..check to see if it's dirty if still you can't get it to work, take the hard drive out of the 486 and put it in u're main computer and put the system files on it, then put it back into u're 486..u should then be able to boot it up with out a floppy

I know the disk drive is OK, so I try the second idea, (later). Thnx Topz Keep'em coming

Are you sure you don't have a 720k drive with a 1.44mb disc in it?

to name yes mate tested that, made boot disk on single sided disk (& chaged the BIOS) still did not work, tested the disk drive on another system, it worked fine (& is 1.44) thnx topz

my head hurts 8-( neXussT made the hard drive Im using for this (Quantum prodrive lps 99mb) bootible, tested-> boots to the prompt up when in my main system. got my sytem to auto detect the hard drive copyed the info down(so I could set the Bois on the 486 to the hard drive). --> 486 now goes BEEP BEEP HDD Controller Failure Press To Resume BEEP BEEP Drive Not Ready Error Oh my what can I do? Topz

Did you check the cable on the floppy drive? Installing the drive without the twisted pair connector will cause this problem. How about the boot sequence? A: c: Other possibilities are a bad cable, or a faulty power supply. As far as the hdd, older motherboards are often picky about how a drive is jumpered and reported to the bios. If the bios doesn't support LBA mode and your drive is using LBA addressing it will fail if the bios is expecting CHS. Likewise, if the drive's jumper is set to master, and the bios is expecting a slave this will cause an error. Try setting the drive to its cable select jumper. You seem fairly knowledgeable to me, so hang in here. I'm sure you'll figure it out.