I picked up a 386 & 486 PCs And these error messages come up.After C: DRIVE FAILURE OR HD FAILER,IF I pres F1 to continue,the second error appears,and states insert boot diskett in A: -press any key to continue.
I don't know if any programing is on the pc.
I tryed booting with a win 98,win 95,dos 6.20 boot.exe disk,none of wich worh.I can't get beyond insert boot disk.
The 486 cd-rom light stays on constant.
The hds spin and the other screens come up to the error parts.
If you know how i could get these booted,please E-mail me the solutions and post them. I am assuming 3.1 windows is on them because they are older machines.
I am on a slightly newer PC,and am on the net of course.
Any real solutions step by step or easy directions would be much appriciated . TY

Hi TLynnC:
First try looking at BIOS to see if hard drive & floppy drive are set correctly (most PCs you hit the delete key right after memory check). Being an old PC the BIOS battery (if yours has a replaceable one, not a soldered one or a dallas device) might be bad causing the BIOS memory to get removed when you turn off PC power. If BIOS is O.K. then see if you can put in DOS install (disk 1) & boot with it to see if it can detect hard drive & check it. If not then you could have a bad ISA connections to motherboard (or could be dirty) if it is not on motherboard (also motherboard could be bad). Work your way through checking devices & connections up to hard drive, last thing is to remove hard drive & see if it works in another PC using a boot disk in a:\ (don't forget to set bios information for hard drive), the hard drive itself could be bad, no easy way to test things in your PC.

Good luck.
Z

You need to create the boot disks with the *.exe first with your newwer machine then try to boot off them.

If you can boot into DOS with a floppy, following some of what was already said above, then you should be able to do some basic troubleshooting for your hard disk, from within the DOS boot disk.

The DOS boot disk should have scandisk.exe - chkdsk.exe - format.exe and some other files on it, for checking the drive, what's on it, and so on. If the hard disk has errors, you should be able to find those with a THOROUGH scandisk. If the hard disk shows up in the bios, but that's the only place from where you can see it, then try using FDISK in order to create a primary DOS partition. However, if the drive previously used another Operating System, such as OS Warp or something, then you'd need to use FDISK in order to DELETE and NON DOS partitions.

Some of those older 386.486 systems were a nightmare to work with, so yeah, unless it's one of the early tower setups, removing the drive might be a real learning experience for you . . .

Hey Intel, AMD rulez!

Orig. poster. I've been working on the 486.and at one point i got it to auto detect the HD,but now it don't again.Either way,I still get the insert bootdisk,on both 386 & 486. I have been surfing the net,and have tryed the EXE. boot disk 6.20,6.21, 6.22,and i've tryed my win 95 bootdisk w/ all nessesary files,and win 98 bootdisk.None of which will boot.
I am stumped ! I have reversed cable and back,set bios to HD specs,ext.
It's probably something easy.I had to have a pro. set up my 166 w/ 95 after i messed it up,but i have since reformatted from scratch,so i know that boot disk is good.
I'm just messin around,I am afraid to mess w/ my 166 pen.,w/ installing the HDs to see if the work,w/resetting bios, I don't want to mess this one up.
Suggestions or reassurences if I do,and where to go from here.Oh my bios settings stay,so that mean the BATT. is good ?

Hi TLynnC:
One last thing that came to mind is make sure that hard drive is set as master not slave. If you have your bios set to boot a:\ c:\ (start PC with boot disk in floppy drive), you should be able to use a Win 98 startup disk (use the setting for install not using CD-ROM) to get you to a:\. From there you can see if you can switch to c:\ drive, if not my guess is that you have a bad connection or bad device(s). If you want to find out if the hard drive is bad, the best way is to hook it into another PC, then you will know if it works & the problem is somewhere else in your PC.

Good luck.
Z

Your bios stuff is saved by you after making changes to it. If changes are saved, your bios or CMOS battery (flat, watch like battery) is fine. Keeping the system running 24 X 7, actually keeps that battery charged too. Many people don't know that.

If you're sure that your hard disk is fine - but empty, then you obviously won't be able to boot up by using the hard drive - since that would require for stuff, like windows system files, to be installed on it. But as you stated, the drive may be fine.

Next step is to put stuff on your hard drive, for which you'd need that bootable floppy disk.

With an empty hard drive, you have to install DOS before you can install Win3x since win3x uses DOS during the setup process. That requires strictly a DOS boot diskette. Other, standard windows boot disks, won't work. It has to be a DOS boot or setup disk.

However, if your floppy drive won't allow you to use a DOS boot disk, then the problem can be with the floppy drive itself, and not the rest of your system. In your bios, make sure that your floppy is set to 1.44 MB - and drive A. Also make sure that the BOOT SEQUENCE is in proper order, that should be first "A" and then "C" drive. Ther floppy drive cable is normally REVERSED from the hard drive cable. If you have a tower case, and are looking at the rear of the machine, your hard drive cables should have a red stripe on the RIGHT side, and the floppy drive should have a red stripe on the LEFT side of the cable. On some floppies, it's easy to accidentally move the cable over - one pin set too many - which dmages nothing, but doesn't allow the drive to work either. Make sure that your floppy cable is attached correctly - get a flashlight if you need to see better - that's what I do.
On your mobo, all of the red stripes from the cables should be either on the left, or facing down. Those are the standard cable postitions of most motherboards.

If you have a real old 720K floppy drive, none of the above will help. On the other hand, if you'r sure that your floppy is a 1.44 MB drive, and none of the above helps, then perhaps the drive itself is bad. I've seen floppy drives die from one day to the next. They generally don't provide you with weird behavior or error messages. Here's rootin' for 'ya . . .

Hey Intel, AMD rulez!

Orig. poster: Well Thanks for the advise,but i gave up.I did put both HDs in my 166 mhz PC,the one from the 486 still said failer so i assume it is bad.The 386 HD,I managed to format it and load win 95,but as you can imagine the space it left was little.
I then tryed putting the hd back in the 386,but guess what ?? no luck . I tryed writting the hd perimeters in bios,auto detect and nothing.
Also when i put the 166 back together i would not write the perimeters that prior existed. I had to auto detect,and i comes up diff. than before,but so far it's working.
Thanks anyway,they're going in the trash.

ok i need help i et up a very old comp (1990) i think it has do on it but i do not know how to configure my floppy drive i have one HUGE one i think 5 somrthing but it huge than i got one of the regular kind and one hddi was wondering how do i configure thses drvies???? i dont know how many mb it can hold and i dopnt know the kind of floppys i have to configure it. sometimes when i try to congigure it says error system halted and other times it says drive error read insert boot disk can some1 plz help me??? plz write back thanks