I keep getting a 'Missing Operating System' message when I try to boot up. I tried F1, F2, F8 and Delete at start up with no luck. I do not have a startup boot floppy. (any help on making one from a download?) Using a Gateway 1100

Try downloading one from: bootdisk.com

Can you get into the BIOS? Make sure your boot sequence is set correctly. Did you somehow reformat your Hard drive? Can you hear the Hard drive running and is the activity light doing anything?

Once you've tried all of Brant's suggestions, and if none of them yield an answer, you should download a diagnostic boot disc from whomever manufactured the hard drive in your laptop (it won't be gateway, you'll have to take the drive out to look at it). IBM has such a diagnostic boot disc, so does Hitachi (although if memory serves I had to email a request for it and they sent it as an attachment). This will perform a pretty rigorous test of the integrity of your hard drive to see if it locates bad sectors. If it finds one you may be able to perform a low-level (actually a mid-level) format with it and salvage your hard drive. All your data though will be gone. You can try a regular boot disk, try typing sys c: from the a: prompt. If you get an error message it probably means the hard drive is fried. Also if it won't let you format or fdisk likely the hd is dead.

First, let me thank all of you for your replies, I've gone through forums before with no help or replies at all! I was able to d/l a startup boot disk. I did not reformat the drive (I do not really want to do that at this point as a couple of gigs of data were not backed up yet) I cannot get into the BIOS. sys C: from the a: prompt give an error message. I'm going to open it up to check the manufacturer of the HD and try to make a diagnostic boot disk (will I find that from the manufacturers site???) Thanks again!