Hi, I have an old intel 286 and i think the CMOS battery is toast and it forgot a whole bunch of settings. I had to reinstall the 3 1/2 in diskette drive and the HD. I know this computer had some sort of an operating system on it when i used it about 12 years ago but i cant remember what is was(i was too young). I am guessing some sort of dos. The problem is it wont boot of the hard drive and it keeps on saying non-system disk or disk error... so it wont boot of the hard disk. I have tried using various dos boot disks from bootdisk.com and so on and i even tried making my own and it wont work. But know i think it will only boot off of the 5 1/4 in floppy drive and i dont have another computer with a drive like that. I looked in the cmos settings and i cant find out how to change the boot sequence. So is booting off a 5 1/4 in floppy the only way or can this be fixed? shane

You have to go back in time, here. So far as I know, computers this old had a fixed boot order that could not be changed. I believe the common deal was the floppy, --maybe the B floppy--and then the hard drive. Probably all had to boot first off whatever drive was on the end of the cable--no "swap" of drives. You'll have to look physically Also, there is no reliable way that I know of to tell the difference between 5 1/4 drives that are 1.2 or 360K capacity, but the bios must be proberly set. Just because it won't boot from the hard drive does NOT mean that the drive is bad, or that there is no system. SOme drives could be set for alternate "settings" and operated that way. If you went back and changed the parameters, the drive would not appear to "be" there. A few things to try. First, either floppy could possibly be the "wrong" capacity,--the 3 1/2 might be either 720K, or 1.44, so try the bios setting, and try known good disks Same deal with the 5 1/4--could be 360k, or 1.2MB. If you have another working system, that has "auto detect" try to read the hard drive in there. Also read carefully the label of the drive, and check jumper settings. Can you get "into" the bios? SOme of these old dogs had a floppy based bios program.

yes i can get into the bios and diag. The bios has all of the information for the drives. The 3 1/2 is set for 1.44mb and the 5 1/2 is set for 1.2mb. I think when the CMOS battery ran out of power or whatever happened the hard drive information was lost so at first is didnt reconize any hard disks. So i went into the bios and tried to install the hard drive and it had 46 different setting for them and one that you could set the settings yourself. I opened the computer up and looked on the hard disk and all it sead was cycl. 786 or sumthing like that and i think it said it had 4 heads. I tried a couple settings with cylc rates in the 700's and they didnt work so i put it onto the first setting and it reconized the hard drive(well it didnt have an error). So maybe i did that wrong im not sure. shane

Post back the model # of the hard drive. The only floppy drive it will boot from is whatever is cabled as A:. If you want to boot from a 1.44 then make sure it's attached to the connector after the 7-wire twist, if you have that type cable. If your floppy cable doesn't have the twist then you need to set the drive's DS jumper to the lowest setting. (The settings usually go from DS0 to DS3 or DS1 or DS4. A 1.44 may only have two DS settings.)

Part of my point is, that regardless of what the bios settings NOW SAY, be SURE what your floppies are--the 3.5, may NOT be a 1.4. You should be able to read the hdd settings off the hard drive, or look up the model on the o'l net here. You're right--"user defined" is probably what you need.

I would first set the floppy drives for double density rather than the high density you have it currently set for. Then use a double density boot floppy. When powering on, watch the order of the access lights on the discs, this should give an idea of which is drive A: Identify the make and model of the hdd and from that you can trace the parameters needed for the bios. Good Luck - Keep us posted.

All good advice and info there. If the FDD cable has no twist, I would simply disconnect the 5.25" and see if it tries to read the 3.5" on boot. If I was to start moving FDD jumpers, I would make a diagram of where the jumpers are now. Also, as indicated in earlier replies, if you get the CHS geometry back to where it was, you may very well find that the HD still has the OS. Good luck If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2