I have a Dell 486P/20 PC. The original hard drive crashed and I replaced it with a NOS (new old stock), 1 GIG Seagate ST31220A hard drive. Unfortunately, when I run DOS setup (a:/setup), DOS successfully reads the files on the floppy disk, but does not write them to the floppy disk. The message says something along the lines of: "ERROR WRITING FILE TO DISK." It is not just one file that will not write to the hard drive, but a series of important files such as "qbasic." I have reformatted (c: format) the hard drive several times and have repartioned (c: fdisk) it as well. It seems as if I am going in circles. I feel lost as I am not familiar with command line interfaces anymore due to the dominating GUI (graphic user interface), WINDOWS! I am a college student in a major bind and am pleading for any help I can get!

try fdisk/mbr to repair the master boot record. Maybe this helps. uli

Are you certain tha the drive is set up correctly in the BIOS? Is it correctly jumpered? Possibly running a disk scanner (scandisk, norton, pctools) would turn up errors? Wouldn't hurt to test the install floppies either. Technically, once the system files are on there, 'the rest of DOS' is merely a matter of adding the (expanded) files to the DOS directory and writing your config.sys & autoexec.bat. Use

If your DOS Setup Disks are correct. Disk 1 should be bootable, so no need to run A:\SETUP as it should do this for you. Also (just to check) You are not getting the famous "Insert Disk 1" message are you? If run correctly DOS Setup will transfer and make your C:\ Drive Bootable, But only if you boot your system from the Disk 1 Setup Disk. It will the expand and transfer the DOS files to C:\DOS and write basic Autoexec.Bat & Config.Sys files for you. PowerLoad Home Page Please reply with a message to let us all know we are on the right track with you