I bought this Compudyne 386 slx/25 brand new and had always worked great. Been sitting on the shelf for about a year and the wife decided she wanted to get it down and play a few dos games we had on it. It will not boot up. It has Dos 5.0 with win 3.1. It boots to the point where it gives bios version and base memory and extended memory and then just a blinking curser. I still have the original 3 dos 5.0 disks and I put the first one in DRV A:, turn computer on and it checks drive A then just goes to the hard drive and to the blinking curser. Hard drive continues to run untill you shut it off. I went to bootdisk.com and downloaded all the boot disks for 5.0 up to 6.22 boot disks but they don't do any diffrent. Can someone tell me what my next move would be? I thought it would boot right up from A drive but no luck. It doesn't have a cd rom, just the a drive. Would really like some direction here. Thanks in advance Fritz Thavenet

If it's not getting past the POST screen then it's not actually booting. Commonest complaint with older machines is a dead CMOS or RTC battery. See if you can access the CMOS on that machine (assuming it has one) and ensure that the drives (HDD & FDD) are being recognized correctly. In case you're not aware, the bootdisk files available for download are not themselves bootable, and must be executed from a desktop to create the actual bootdisk. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

If it's trying but failing to read the floppy, you may need to check BIOS, as jboy says. See to it that it has the HD & FD types correct. With the power off and unpluged, reseat all cables. Try your boot disk in another PC, so you know if the disk is bootable. HTH M2 If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.