Help? :) please

ok my other computer, is P1 166 32 mb ram etc, pritty naff, but i decided to start it up again just for that hell of it, i tried to format the C;\ drive which worked fine. Then i put in the Win 98 disk i have and the loading screan appears and then it brings up a message saying theat it cant read from the C:\ drive! aargh.

so i switched it off, and then back on again. and now whenever i turn it on it says that there is a non sytem disk in! :confused: but there are no disks in at all. i have tried the bot disk i made before i formated it, and the win 98 disk itself, i have also tried ms dos boot disks i have dowloaded of the net, but to no avail. :(

is there any way to help my computer in it present state-as in with out buying it a new ahrd drive?

When the system is loading keep hitting the del key, the bios will load up, from there you need to set your start up device to your CD drive, once done save and exit.

Put the CD in and restart, from there you can install using the 98 CD-ROM.

Hope that helps :D

When it say's non-system disk, it means it doesn't have anything to boot from. If you just formatted the HD, obviously it can't boot from that. If there's no floppy or CD in, then there's nothing to boot from at all, and so you get that message. Buying a new HD won't help, since a new HD will have no system on it to boot either.

If it's not booting from floppy/CD when you do have one in, check that they're actually a bootable floppy/CD (the Win98 install CD should be bootable anyway), and as Baloki said, check that the computer is set to try booting off of either of them too in the BIOS. With a computer that old, you might also have to explicitly tell it to try booting from CD before trying the HD.

ok, thanks, i'l try that tonight, and get back to you in the morning :) thank you very much



ok, i tried that, and manadged to get it to boot from a floppy and load MS-dos. i put in the win 98 disk and ran setup.exe. that wroked fine and the setup went off without a hitch. however when i started it up again the screan was ..kinda fragmented, there was a thin band of screan and the that was prepeated again and again, across the whole screan. :confused: so what do i do know? please bear in mind that it may be my moniter as that is a naff one also.