I purchased these group of CPU's that had the O/S removed from the system. I bought WIN98 and decided to dowload it. It will not start up. I have tried changing the boot drive in the BIOS and it still does not work. I have created some boot disks, but the system will not load them becasue they are not SYstem disks. How dod I get to the DOS prompt. I have a DO@ 6.22 on floppy and the system will not boot from it. I get the same error: Non-system disk. What can I do? I am a little CPU literate, but never run into this problem. I do not know what to do?

Use the Win98 bootdisk found at the bottom of Mesich.com's Freeware page in the above link.

Regards,
Bryan

What are the range specs of these systems?

How are they setup boot-wise in the BIOS?

I am confused...

CPU = Central Processing Unit, it is not feasible to un/install an Operating System on this.

"I bought WIN98 and decided to dowload it"

ugh!! does not make sense...

You boot from a W98SE boot disk, a self-extracting/creating winimage file is available from:

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Obviously BIOS must be set to boot from floppy.

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/#me...

Don't take this the wrong way but it would be an idea to get the terminology a bit better. CPU = Central Processor Unit which is a "component" of the computer - the heart of it. What you have gotten hold of is three "computers" (machines or even boxes if you like).

I don't think you've changed something called a "boot drive", more likely you changed the order in which the drives boot (ie floppy, cd drives, hard disk).

By downloading the OS I think you mean you tried to install W98.

Right, enough of that. Firstly you don't need DOS 6.22 or anything of that ilk. When you load Windows it installs it's own DOS. Before you do that you use DOS commands from a boot floppy.

So go to the link Bryco gave and "create" the floppy on some other machine. I'm not familiar with the one from mesich but usually you don't just copy the file(s) onto the floppy.

Once you have your floppy, put it into the drive "then power on" which should give you the A prompt. Watch the screen while it is booting because often your usual CD drive letter gets borrowed (to create a RAM drive). You then choose CD-ROM support, pop in your W98 CD and once you've found your CD drive letter you switch to it and run setup.

If your CD drive has become E then you type E: to switch to it. Once you are there you can type dir if you wish, to ensure that setup.exe is visible. Type setup to start the install (hit Return after all commands).

DerekW

.... looks like I overlapped with orbital.

DerekW

If you're getting the 'non system disk' error and you're using a good floppy bootdisk then the floppy drive may be bad. (It may be good enough to know there's a disk in it but not good enough to read it.)

Otherwise when using a bootdisk make sure the floppy drive comes before the hard drive in the boot order in cmos/bios setup.

Sorry about the terminology. I created a MS-DOS start with a computer that had a a drive. I am now stuck on the A: drive and when i put in other drives or switch to other drives it says path invalid. What would you recommend

Also when I go to the boot.com/boot.html and transfer those. When I try to run it I get another error; Winimage not supported by this drive device. I also went to the one Bryco suggested and the same thing happened.

This is a hardware fault, you need to check BIOS that all drives are recognised!

If you try to switch to a drive that doesn't exist you get 'invalid drive specification' not a path error. As Derek mentioned, to switch to another drive just type the drive letter followed by a colon-- C: --and then ENTER.

Creating a bootdisk should be a breeze. Downloading and running a file from one of the above sites should be all you need to do. If you're getting an error then download a different file. Or maybe it's the computer you're using while online now. What OS does it have?

Also are you still trying to create a dos 6.22 disk or a 98 disk?

Hi it sounds like the hard disks inside the computer have beeb wiped of data. Some firms including sellers on ebay do this for legal reasons. Any way try to find out what hard disk size you have as this does make a difference to the operating system you might use [presumably windows].It sound like you could have maybe 3 issues-
*You have not formatted [prepare the hard disk for windows].Get a Windows 98 boot disk from somewhere; download to a floppy and 'unzip' the contents of the zip file to the floppy disk. Insert the boot disk in to the floppy drive and power up computer-if all is well the pc will bypass DOS and boot to this-
a:/ or something like that. This is called the 'a prompt'. Now try this type dir and press enter. If successful you should now have alist of files on the floppy drive including format and fdisk. Now type fdisk and the computer will tell you that you might have a hard disk that can hold large amount of data. If it asks would you like to enable large disk support, type y and enter. You will get another screen now showing hard disk information. Look for the option to see if your hard disk is active and what size partition you have, normally in megabytes. if it says you have 19,000 megabytes then you have a 19 gig hard disk and you need win 98 or better! Press escape the control, alt, delete to restart. You will get back to the a:/prompt.Now try to find your hard disk-type C: hopefully the c: will turn to C: and you have a hard disk ready for loading windows.
NOw try e: to find your CD Rom or maybe f:
Incidentally when you reboot as you shoud do check what your CD Rom drive letter might be in the information provided.Type e: and enter then type dir to show the file on the CD Rom.
Now return to the a: prompt. Type format c:/ and press enter. The pc will then prepare the Hard Disk for use. Give a name for the Hard Disk or just press enter. Reboot the pc after this process, return to the E: prompt and type win98\setup, press enter and follow all the instructions.
*Check all cables inside the pc and outside are connected properly. Get inside the bios on startup and make sure the floppy drive i set to 'boot first' when setting up Windows with boot disk.After windows is setup return the bios to laod the C drive first [usually HD0] then floppy then CD Rom.
Another issue coulb be you might have an upgrade issue of Windows 98 not original try loading Win95 then upgrade to win 98.

Re #11.

The following commands are incorrect and will therefore not work:

format c:/
This should read format c:

win98\setup
This should just read setup

a:/ is similarly incorrect.
The forward slash is only used as a "switch" (or qualifier) to a DOS command.

DOS commands have to be exact - best guesses will not do.

If you watch the screen whilst booting with a floppy it will tell you what drive letter has been temporarily grabbed as a RAM drive. Mostly your normal CD drive is one letter above it's norm (eg E for D). With a bootdisk made in Windows you don't need to worry about this. Just typing setup from the A prompt will start Windows installing from the appropriate CD drive.

DerekW

.... but I'd already covered this in my #4

DerekW

'problemswithpc' - Gee, that's a name that instills confidence (and clearly a fan of quantity over quality)

First time here?

... the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others

Report Offensive Follow Up For Removal

Yep and unzipping the contents of the downloaded bootdisk onto a floppy disk is usually a non-runner too. These bootdisks usually have to be "created" by running the appropriate program file which is incorporated in the download.

Spending a little time on accuracy is well worthwhile and most likely to help posters who are already in trouble.

DerekW