I'm running XP Home from a restoration disk. It limited the hard drive during the install and so I want to partition and format manually and install XP Pro. I get a non system disk error when trying to boot with a startup disk. I've tried 2 boot disks now, both of which I KNOW to be working Win 98 and Win ME.....with the same result. Bios is set to read from floppy as first device and the floppy works fine otherwise. Just won't read the startup disk in DOS. Any ideas on why this is happening?

The only thig I can suggest is that the floppy drive's heads are out of alignment. If that's the case it will work fine with floppies that it creates, but may not read floppies created by another drive.

It reads floppy disks fine in windows. Just not start up disks in DOS. For some reason it is seeing them as non system disks

So why not use the XPpro installation disc to do what your partitioning needs are? It will wipe the drive and partition it and install it all without the use of the floppy IN THE MATTERS OF STYLE, swim with the current; in matters of principle, STAND LIKE A ROCK Visit Computer Vitals For A Pleasant Surprise

I can't do that because the disk is not a restoration disk it's a full install. And does not have the service packs included. So if I install it over the current version, it will still only recognize the limitation of 137 GB instead of the entire hard drive. I made a slip streamed CD with the Windows installation CD and Service Pack 2 but cannot use it (I don't think) unless I manually partition the drive to it's full capacity.