i recently installed an hsb(apache) m/b, with a cyrix 686(266mhz) chip, i have 48mb of memory and two rather old hard drives(135mb, primary master:426mb, secondary master). im booting off the older one & previously had no problems with it now even though i leave in windows 3.1 or dos the error: non system disk or drive error continually pops up.PLEASE HELP if you can my mother will kill if i dont get it up & running

Calm down...There are several reasons you could get this message. You should check your bios settings to make sure that it can even recognize the disk. Make sure that there isn't anything in the floppy drive. And it's possible the system files are missing. Boot up with a system disk and at the command prompt type sys c: if you get a message that you specified an invalid drive you have one of two problems... either the harddrive isn't being seen by the bios (could be unplugged wrong bios etc.) or something (virus or accident cause by a user) erased your partition. If it still doesn't work, elaborate on the problem and I'll try again.

Hi, Just one more thing to consider. Some old hard drives is too slow for new motherboards with advanced IDE controllers. In BIOS setup try to disable IDE HDD Block Mode and if this not help try to disable IDE Ultra DMA Mode and manually force zero PIO mode for both your drives. Good luck, Igor M

my computer cannot get to dos prompt nor the a:/ prompt. everytime I put a disk in it say non-operating system disk or disk error. what disks do I need to bring my prompting back online

Did you ever get an answer to your problem, I am having the same problem and dont know what to do. I got this computer that is 6 yrs old and want my son to use it for school. We were informed that there is nothing on it. I am trying to run windows 3.1 on it. Everytime I put in a disk it say non operating system disk or disk error. Were we given a lemon? Please help