I really don't know what I've done but will try and put it in sequence in hope someone has an idea which may help. My brothers 386 was having major problems, I got it to the point where I could boot from floppy (dos 6.22) and could then get into Win 3.1, but I have done something and now it won't boot at all. He has 2 HD, 'C' which is an old Seagate 120mb IDE and 'D' which is a Quantum 240 mb IDE, they are both detected in CMOS auto detect and the values are correct. He also has 2 floppys, I changed them so 'A' is the small 1.44 and 'B' is the big old 5 1/4 inch. What happened is D drive was showing full no matter what I did but nothing was on it, I couldn't get into scan disk to see if it was full of bad thingies and decided to format it (didn't matter as I was told it was just games used to be on it anyway) so I formated it then went into fdisk and made a primary boot partition, all this worked so I then formated it again (was told to do this by a friend who said it must be formated after partitioning it) still wouldn't read drive D then I got it into my head to format C drive- why? Don't ask as it was about 3am by this stage and I'd been able to boot from a dos 6.22 floppy till then then all of a sudden in Win 3.1 I had a lock up then when I rebooted I couldn't get it to boot from the floppy, so I formated the drive in hope that I could then re boot from floppy and reinstall dos then I'd worry about windows later BUT it won't recognize the boot disk which up till now has booted up the system, now for some reason it won't and because of this I can't get into anything, just says non system disk error and when I try again I keep geting the message....when I remove the disk it says no boot disk in drive and as I wiped C drive (which wouldn't boot anyway before I formated it) I don't even get a dos prompt etc. The A drive is set in CMOS to boot first then C drive. I have tried inserting the forst disk of the DOS 5.0 set up set (the only ones I have) and I get the same message, non system disk. Have tried a couple of other bootdisks I have around but none work. Please someone help, I was doing so well with this till that error in Windows and then I reset and everything has gone screwy. thanks Jacinta in Australia

I think if he had the 5.25" floppy set as A: then it was connected that way inside of the computer and if you put it back that way and use a 5.25" boot diskette, it might work. if that is the situation, you'll need to connect the floopy drives properly inside of the computer to use the 3.5" one as A: mostly it's a matter of just connecting the drive intended for A: to the end of the floppy cable but you may require adapters for the connectors or a more modern cable. some older floppies may have jumpers for drive select (d0, d1) in that case the computer should have a straight floppy cable... that is to say that part of the ribbon cable would not be folded over on the last connector in that type of system.

Another case of the "format fix" *g* Ok, you can't switch the floppy boot order just by changing the CMOS - if the machine was originally set to boot from the big 5 1/2" drive, make sure that's how it's set in CMOS. Probably it should be set as 1.2 Mb - that makes a big difference too - whatever capacity that the boot disk is will probably work. Computers always boot from the A: drive - this will be the one that the indicator light comes on first at startup. If you manage to boot from a floppy, you can put the DOS Operating System back by: sys c: and you should see 'system transferred' Of course, there won't be much else on C:, may need to re-install everything, certainly the rest of DOS, possibly Windows, hard to say what's on D: or if it's messed up. Not trying to be discouraging, but maybe your brother should be doing this.

But you get LOTS of points for not calling tech support... and more points for screwing up everything on a computer where it didn't matter much what happened. ---------------- This usually occurs after making a new partition and not formatting... if you do CHKDSK you'll get lots and lots of gibberish. But, once, I kinda had a problem like this... I accidentally chopped a partition down a little too small, or it just kind of happened and wasn't my fault, so it showed as 0 bytes free, then I got it back to normal size, and was greeted by some errors such as "sector not found" and other rather discouraging things. I messed with it and messed with it and had to format.... even Norton Disk Doctor was useless in this case.

First, get a good boot disk. If possible check the one you have on another computer. Then you are ready to troubleshoot. The problem you had at first could have been that the drives are not jumpered Master/slave correctly. Or the wrong parameters for the drives may be set in the BIOS. There is a twist in the floppy drive cable. Drive A should be beyong the twist on the end of the cable. If you want to use a 3 1/2" floppy boot disk insure that drive A: in the BIOS is set to 1.44 Mbytes and the very end of the cable is hooked to the drive. See if the parameters (Heads, Cylinders and Sectors) are on the hard drives. Then see that those values are listed in the BIOS for the hard drives. ******************************************* I think your problem got worse because you changed A: drive value in the BIOS without changing the position on the ribbon cable. So you said A drive, the 5 1/4" was a 1.44 Mbyte drive and lost the ability to boot. Trying to do so with the drive designated wrong may have corrupted files on the boot disk. Thus you can't change back successfully until you get a good boot disk. When you get the floppy drive working look for either master/slave jumpers or Hard Drive perameters in the BIOS to be wrong. Good Luck.

Let's try and keep this simple. The A: drive MUST BE on the END connector of the floppy cable. When you change the bios settings you must ALSO change the physical placement on the cable. (A: on the END, B: in the MIDDLE of the cable. I would start (just for the @#%$ of it) pull out the slave hd. Work on getting the thing booted to an A: prompt, and get the C: drive fdisked and formatted and readable, and then add in the D: drive. I am NO EXPERT with fdisk, but I have found that different DOS or Win9x versions do work differently. Also, there have been times when Maxtor's drive software for some reason will "cure" a non working drive when MS fdisk or format will not. You should be able to download Maxblast, EZdrive, or any number of other manufacturer's software. The only caveat I've found with stuff like the above, is that you cannot boot to a floppy from a "dead" machine. You have to wait for the system to boot into the overlay software, and a prompt will tell you to do this or that and insert to boot floppy. Other than that, the stuff seems to be transparent.

If you still need a way to boot up, then go to zdnet and search for the ultimate boot disk, it wil only install win 9x or ME but you can probably at least get a command prompt through it, it worked for me on two occasions.