Thanks for the replies...esp. the one about patience, got to work on that one... I gave up on the 386 'cause I have a spare 486 laying about....with no hard drive. Now, I took the hard drive out of the 386, which had Dos on it, and installed it into the 486. Entered setup and auto recognise Hard Drive...All is well, detected hard drive, but will not get me to C Prompt. Right before , I will get an error message..."NO OPERATING SYSTEM". System boots fine, runs POST test, all info is displayed correctly, etc. I guess my question is: Why does the hard drive boot to Dos Prompt when it is in the 386 Computer, but when I physically remove it and put it in the 486, it will not boot to Dos???? It is a 40 MB Hard Drive, Small, I know, but remember, these are just junk computers that I am trying to learn on.. There That's my question for today Thanks to All Akimbooooooooooooooooooooo

2 things 1 make sure the 486 is detecting the HDD exactly as you had it setup in the 386...ie same head # same sectors# etc And if that is ok, then try booting to a dos diskette and run sys c:...this won't format the disk!! but give it a new boot sector. Or you can fdisk /mbr to redo the master boot record, again all data remains intact good luck