I bought a laptop and when I turn it on it has a messages that says that there is no operating system. When I try to use a boot disk to start it up it doesn't start ethier. How do you make it start with a boot disk? thank you,Jeff

Check in the bios that the pc is set to boot off the floppy. Insert a known good boot disk and reboot. You will get a dos prompt from which you can browse the hard drive or install from a cd rom. I suspect that the laptop had its drive deleted before sale and was not sold with an OS. If they were smart they would have wiped the hard drive or partition. If not the partition or files would probably be recoverable with the right software.

You go into the BIOS/CMOs setup program and look for "boot sequence". Change the order so that it boots to the "A" drive 1st. A drive may be listed as "removable devices" or "floppy", ect. Depending on your BIOS, the way you get into this setup is to hit a key while it's booting up. The most common keys are DEL, or F1 or F2. By the way, what operating system is it running? This post is in the Win 9x forum, but 75MHz is pretty old...is it running DOS or Win 3.1, or is it 95? If it's Win 95, and when you boot up with the boot disk, if you can see the C: drive, then your hardware is ok. At that point, at the A: prompt type this: fdisk /mbr (hit enter) Then type sys C: (hit enter) After it says "system transfered", remove the floppy and reboot. If you can't get to your C: drive, it could be a number of things, loose cable, bad hard drive, ect.

Used computers sold by retail resellers have the OS wiped off due to agreements with the company that was the previous owner and also Microsoft. It's against MS licensing agreement to leave the OS on the machine because it was a bulk user license. You need to install an OS. You don't say how much memory you have so I can't recommend what might work.

Yeah, I just read the above post, (we replied almost at the same time)it could be that you would also need to partition the drive again if the previous owner deleted it. If that's the case, you'll need to do that before doing those other commands that I suggested in my first post. You use fdisk for that. Then you'll need to format the drive. If you need guidance, look here: http://www.pcabusers.com/fdisk.html