I have an old computer that has Windows 3.1 on it that I took to college. When I moved about a year ago it wasn't turned on so the battery died. When I tried to turn it on to use it the battery was dead and I had to redo setup etc. After buying a new battery it still won't come up right. After correcting the setting it wants the boot disk, however when the boot disks are put in it says the disc is invalid and will do nothing more. I was told I may need to associate the drives? Can someone help me with the problem? Thanks.

Without actually knowing the vintage, it may be that the hard drive hasn't been setup correctly in the CMOS after replacing the battery.

If the hard drive isn't setup properly, or the boot files are not found for any reason, then you'll get the error message.

In order to boot from a floppy, the floppy must be listed as the first boot device in the BIOS.

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Hi Mel2003:
If you have a 486 (33mhz) or faster motherboard you should have an auto detect section for hard drive in BIOS. When your BIOS battery goes bad you need to reset your floppy & hard drive information for PC to boot correctly, if you have a floppy boot disk it should open to DOS prompt if floppy settings are correct. If you have an older motherboard you may need to manually put in HD information in users option, if you have a second newer PC (or a friend) that you can connect to auto detect your HD, then write down the information so you can use it on your Win 3.1 PC.

Good luck,
Z

Thanks for the advice, but I think my HD is gone. I discovered today while playing around with different things that it doesn't acknowledge DOS either. It will start to boot up with the DOS disk and then it detects an error and stops.

That's not very clear, but if you're giving up, we may as well too.

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Sorry I wasn't clear. I discovered that the reason it was rejecting my Windows disks was because DOS is completely gone also. My neighbor who is studying computers told me that it sounded like the hard drive was wiped out. After I had made sure the settings were correct it still will not acknowledge any disks. The good news is a friend of mine said if it is the hard drive he may have another one I could try. I'm not giving up yet, but I'm not very computer literate so I'm not really sure what this all means. Thanks.

Ok. The DOS could (probably) easily be reinstalled or repaired, the hard drive could be replaced if, as you suspect, it's done.

Generally speaking, a floppy boot should be successful regardless of (or even without) the HDD.

Sorry - just sounded like you hit a snag and got discouraged. Many of the 'Windows problems' reported here are often due to hardware or DOS difficulties.

Keep at it - if nothing else, it'll be educational. Feel free to post back with issues or progress.

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Hi Mel2003:
Have your friend put your hard drive in one of his PCs (need to set bios unless he has auto detect setting) & used a boot disk in floppy a:/ drive. If he gets to a:\ prompt tell him to see if he can get to c:\, then use DOS command like c:\dir to see if anything shows. If it does try installing DOS then re-install windows 3.1 over your current version. One thing I found about an old hard drive is that if the master boot sector goes bad then an OS won't start, you get a "missing systems" message. If you hard drive is still readable I would setup another master hard drive & use yours as a slave to copy back your important data.

Good luck,
Z