Someone gave my friend an emachine laptop . It starts to boot up but at one point it says in a red box---save to disc file cannot be found. save to disc disabled---. It will boot no further. Any suggestions? He knows someone that might have a 98 CD. Would that work? I let him try my 98 restore CD for my emachine desktop but it wouldn't work . When he chooses any of the 3 options; do not format hard drive, format hard drive, or, boot to DOS prompt from CD ROM, it will continue no further then letting him type in one of the three choices. It says ---system error, computer is not responding---. Thanks

The restore disks are matched to their original system and won't work on a different one. That's likely why it didn't work. Not much comes up when googling 'save to disc disabled' except your posting in the other forum. 'Save to disk disabled' turns up more responses including this one: http://www.computing.net/dos/wwwboa... You might try running scandisk as suggested there. Try tapping F8 before the OS starts to load and choose 'safe mode command prompt only' from the menu. Then, if you get to a C:\ prompt type SCANDISK C: and enter. I think the OS system files are corrupted or you've got a problem with the hard drive--maybe some bad spots. Since the laptop is new to your friend I'd suggest he format and do a clean install of 98 with the disk he thinks he can find. Reformatting will mark any bad spots as unusable and should allow a good install of 98 unless the drive is failing.

Depending on the exact wording, I found some info indicating that message may occur if the drive was originally set up using PHDISK. The previous owner may have deleted the partitions to remove any personal info he had on the drive. If that's the case, the F8 option to boot to dos won't work. If the partition(s) are gone it would require a fresh installation on your part to get it up and running. (edit) You may be able to disable the message in cmos/bios setup but I'm still betting the partitions are gone.

Thanks for your time and replies. I'll let my friend read those replies and he'll probably try to see if they help. Thanks again.

You're welcome. Let us know how it turns out.

i found a old packard bell monitor and a tower that has 98 when it boots up before it goes to the main desktop a box comes up with a title windows somthing support with lines going across the screen and all the way down the box is streched across the screen in five or six timeacross the top and there multipal cursers i cant type or move the cousor please help

It sounds like the screen area set in windows isn't compatible with your monitor. Start up the computer. Before the OS starts to load start tapping F8. A menu should come up. Choose SAFE MODE. It should go OK to the desktop. In safe mode the screen area will be 640 x 480 which is compatible with every VGA monitor. Right click on a blank part of the screen. Choose PROPERTIES, then SETTINGS. It should show a 640 x 480 screen area and 16 colors. Click OK. A message should come up notifying you that you're changing it to that setting when you reboot. Click OK or NEXT and reboot. When it reboots to normal mode you'll be in 640 x 480 with 16 colors. Once there you can go back into display properties and change the area to 800 x 600, or whatever your monitor can handle. You can probably change the colors to at least 256 also.