I left my computer unplugged and unused for 4 months. I left it with a friend who said he didn't touch it. Anyway, when I turn it on it says "press F1 for configuration setup/utility." Then a little diagram showing F1-F12 comes up and it says "no operating system found. Press F1 to repeat to repeat boot sequence." and it keeps going to a black screen and back to this one and it makes a noise when it does this. If I press F1 it does the same thing. I do have 4 bootable system disks that I made. I also have 3 system and rescue disks. They couldn't hold on one.

I've used these disks to try to reboot and still nothing happens. They go through the loading process and it asks for all the disks however, win 98 will not load. I don't know what to do. Can someone help me please? Thank you

Go into BIOS and see if hard drive is recognized correctly, or at all.

To get to BIOS/setup there will be a 1-2 key combination shown on screen before Windows logo appears.

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Your CMOS battery is probably dead. Therefore you may have to change the battery, then do the setup before your system will boot properly.

I agree that the battery is probably dead or pretty well discharged.

Once you power on the system, enter the bios and look for a Hard Disk Auto-detect function. Run it. If it finds the drive and loads windows, it's probably the battery not holding the bios parameters. If you power off and it looses things again, replace the battery.

It's a good day when you learn something

Generally, the following is true

These kinds of errors are generally caused by the bios battery going dead, and "losing" the bios settings.

CHANGE THE BATTERY. Most modern motherboards use a flat coin battery, about the size of a quarter, available at just about any camera shop, Radio Shi..., or even supermarts.

The bios must know what drives you have installed, including the floppy(s), the hard drive, and the CDROM(s), CDRW(s), or DVD.

Many newer bios programs "auto detect" but some will not, and some will not detect the floppy--

CHECK YOUR SETTINGS

Last, the machine must know WHAT to boot off of.

LOOK FOR a setting such as "startup" or "boot order" or something similar, where you can select boot devices.

I usually select FIRST floppy, SECOND CDROM, and LAST hard drive.