Hi. It's my first attempt to post a message to this great website. I have an old 386 PC and I am trying to get it to work. It's hard drive has been is not working. I am trying to boot it up using a Dos 6.22 boot disk but it doesn't seem to work. The problem is in the floppy drive. I tried it on another computer it worked. I set it up in the CMOS and the drive green light goes on for a second after counting the ram then it says invalid boot diskette. I tried another boot disk which worked on another computer but nothing. I doesn't work at all. I hope anybody can help me. I really want to get it work. Thanks Joe

Might try checking or replacing the drive cables. It might be a bad or dirty drive though, in which case you'd be better off replacing it - although they can be cleaned. There's a slim chance it's a 720K floppy drive - in that case you'd be better off replacing it too. Also check the hard drive's settings - that might enable it to boot without the FDD. It's pretty likely that the CMOS battery is dead - got to be in excess of 12 years old. Some people are like Slinkies™, not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs...

jboy, many thanks for your reply. But I changed both the bettery and used a 1.44 drive instead. It doesn't respond. I tried to remove the hard disk and cancel it from cmos but still nothing. The cable worked just fine on another computer. I hope there is a solution for my problem. Thank you.

Well, if you're receiving invalid system disk messages using a known good floppy, then the problem would seem to be in the floppy drive itself. It appears that you've been through the basics already - have you tried installing a different floppy drive? (that's not clear from what you've posted) Is there a setting for the boot order in the CMOS? It might be necessary to set a: first, or 'enable floppy boot' etc What is the exact error message when attempting to boot from the floppy? It may be that the floppy drive controller is bad - although typically there would be an error message to that effect. Does the system recognize the hard drive in CMOS? Bleat at me no longer.

Yeah thanks a lot. It was the problem of boot sequence. It was set to C: , A:. When I switched it to A: , C:. Everything worked. Thanks a lot jboy.

Sure - that one gets a lot of people. Should be all set now - you can learn a lot from those old boxes, have fun. Bleat at me no longer.