i bought this old laptop look a like for a few $ just to play and learn to work with dos. However the diskette that came with it did not contain dos anymore someone had written over it. To be able to run this little machine i am looking for dos 3.21 on diskette. I tried to download and install it on floppy's myself but the little machine doesnt recognice dos, i have no idea what i did wrong course i have no idea what dos is yet. so if i realy want to learn anything i will have to ask for help. HELP !!!

What size floppy does it use? 5.25 or 3.5? If you go to www.bootdisk.com and download a MSDOS6 boot disk, you will need to extract to floppy after downloaded. This should be enough to see if this PC works and if it has any files on hard drive.

I have dos 5.0 if you want to try that. But like the above statement says, you need to download a boot disk to see if the pc works first.

ok my mistake i wasnt clear in what i have... the machine i am talking about is an 4501 from sharp. It does not have a harddrive, it runs from a floppy only, originaly it had a floppy with dos 3.2 and a word program on top of that basic i tryed to make a copy on my pentium II and since than i cant use the floppy anymore. The message i get is> i tryed a few options like dos 6.0 on a floppy but i keep getting the same message

If that machine originally came with DOS 3.2 then the floppy drive (3-1/2 inch assumed here) is probably a 720k drive and not the standard 1.44 mb drive we use today. Todays 1.44mb drives can read/write to 720kb disks but 720kb drives cannot use 1.44mb disks. Some "software image" applications allow you to format various types of formats in a standard 1.44mb drive. You could use one of these to format a 1.44mb disk as a 720kb disk, then put your MS-DOS 3.2 on it and use it in the old machine. These "image" programs are used to make copies or "images" of diskettes into a file that can be stored on CD or elsewhere. The formatting function of it is an added benefit. A popular and easy-to-use program that is also very capable (I use it myself) is WinImage. Below is the link. Of course if your drive is 1.44 mb after all like the rest of us then this entire message doesn't do any good. http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm