I have an old 486 w/3.1 on it, I went to boot it one day and now it can't recognize the c-drive....I tried to boot from a floppy and fdisk and format but neither are working.... both give me errors... PLEASE HELP

More information is required. Does your PC's BIOS recognize the hard disk? Likely, the CMOS battery went dead, and the hard drive's CMOS settings were lost. Go yo your PC's CMOS settings, and see if the hard drive is seen by the BIOS. If not, try "AUTO" for the HDD. If your BIOS does not have "AUTO", open the machine, and looks at the hard disk for the # of tracks, heads, cylinders, etc. and enter the proper info into the CMOS. If the BIOS sees the HD, then your floppy should be able to see it, also. -Doug

Thank you I'll try that....

A 486 probably does not have auto detect. Enter the BIOS usually by pressing the DEL key as you boot and see what the drive parameters are and whether Floppy drive A is listed as 1.44 Mbytes. If the floppy drive is wrong, the CMOS battery is probably dead. The Cylinders, Heads and Sectors that go in the Master hard drive section at #47 user defined are usually on the hard drive case somewhere. (Do you have any PCI slots? If you do not you probably do not have hard drive detect as they came in about the same time along with hard drives to 8.4 gigabytes. You can put 1.44 in the drive A: space and finish booting, but you have to also enter the hard drive parameters to access drive C:. Once you know what the values are, you can enter them each time you boot until you get a battery. It will be good experience.

Autodetect HDD feature - first available on 386's - common on 486's. PCI slots - to this day, I've yet to seen one on a 486. Twenty years of PC history, and it's just one big amorphous mass to some folks ;-)

I totally agree with jboy. My AMI 486 motherboard had Auto-Detect, my room mates Award 486 has it. Hey jboy! ;>) (I'm back, sporadically. Been busy with some projects.)

re: PCI slots in 486 Gateway 486DX33 1994 4 ISA 4 PCI slots I've seen others.