I have an 80286 system i'm goofing off with. I was reading a floppy in the A drive(of course). The power went out and when I restarted it. It was still in the A drive with the error message,

"Non-System disk or disk error
Replace and press any key when ready."

I cannot get a command prompt or switch to C. I have booted with the Windows disk of the OS that is installed to no avail. I don't know if it is because it can't read the system config files or what. But I heard there are some keys to push to switch it back. I tried all the F keys and some ctrl combinations but nothing works. Pleeeeeaaase help!
-Joshua

Check your BIOS booting sequence and see
if your Hard Drive is in the sequence of options.

HTH,
Ravi

I can't see the loading sequence. It gets as far as Telling me the type of bios I have "Phoenix 80286 ROM BIOS PLUS v.3.10 04 and the base memory 640k and 00384 extended. then i get the error posted earlier.

From your description of the problem all you should have to do is shut it down, take the disk out of the floppy drive and then switch it on again.

It does it with or without the disk in. It thinks the A drive is the C drive. When I was in dos I gave the current drive command CD A: And said i wanted to make A the Current drive. A moment later after the switch the power went out and when I rebooted it rebooted with the A Drive as the current drive still. With the error and no command prompt. I'm Getting desperate here guys.

I'm afraid that your hard drive may be messed up. try booting and run fdisk see if you still have a partition because if you had a partition even if it wasn't formmatted you could still get the C:\> prompt you would just get an error when you tried to access a file, so fisrt try FDISK /MBR
if that don't work run fdisk (type just FDISK)
and make a partition then restart and run "FORMAT C: /S" this should make the hard drive bootable again!

Good luck.

P.S. if you need help with fdisk let me know, I'll help you.

I'm afraid that your hard drive may be messed up. try booting and run fdisk see if you still have a partition because if you had a partition even if it wasn't formmatted you could still get the C:\> prompt you would just get an error when you tried to access a file, so fisrt try FDISK /MBR
if that don't work run fdisk (type just FDISK)
and make a partition then restart and run "FORMAT C: /S" this should make the hard drive bootable again!

Good luck.

P.S. if you need help with fdisk let me know, I'll help you.

I reformatted my Satellite Pro 410CS laptop and wiped out the operating system. When I turn it on I get the error message "invalid system disk" "Replace disk and......" How can I get it to boot up? Or did I totally screw this thing up!
In the system setup menu my base memory is 640KB, and it also shows Shadow BIOS ROM 192KB. What does that mean?

I hate to say it but you got the "monkey virus" There is no way to correct it. Do you have a file sharing program? That could be how you recieved it. It happend to me a while back and it completely wiped out my start up and boot drives...sorry