I have an old Gateway 2000 386 computer and I'm not sure what operating system it requires.When I got it there was an error in the exe file and Windows would not run, so I had to format the hard drive.I don't even have a cd-rom on it.Help!!What do I do?

it should take win3.0 but you need to instal dos 5.0 first and then win3.0 but it may be best to have a dos 5.0 bootdisk if have all these put the bootdisk in and then dos and then windows

If it's got 1 Mb of memory, or more, it'll take Win3.1. Since you need a DOS, why not install 6.22 - a bit better than 5 (imo). I'm kind of curious - you 'had to' format the hard drive? Is this being taught in school now, or what? Formatting really is only required when you first set up the HDD, or when you wish to divide the disk into partitions or change the FAT structure. It just seems senseless (to me anyways) to erase your hard drive just to reinstall a program or upgrade the OS.

Dos 6.22 won`t install over a previous version, i had to do a format c:/q to get rids of old os befor i could install 6.22, even a format c:/s/q wouldnt work, it had to have no system files Woof

That's very strange, Woof, never encountered that before - just did a sys c: from the boot disk and that was it. I routinely set up MS-DOS 6.22 on any machine I get that doesn't have 6.xx, never had to delete any DOS system files.

I get error message "SU0013" Source file: SETUP.TXT, Windows 98. To set up Windows 98, your startup drive must be an MS-DOS boot partition. If your startup drive is an HPFS or Windows NT file system, you must create an MS-DOS boot partition before running Setup. For more information, on creating an MS-DOS boot partition, see the documentation that came with your computer. If you have LANtastic networking or SuperStor compression, see those sections earlier in this document for more information. How can I instal Windows 98 after windows NT was(HD was formatted without doing the change of files )installed before ? Thanks. Tom