[AnEnigma]

Hi all. I started working on this system 3 months ago. First, I had downloaded newer version of Windows media player. Soon after, I lost my cd rom drives, they were not in my computer nor in device manager. I played with it and somehow, got them both back ( I have two cd drives ). Then lost them again, this time no luck retrieving them.

Did a system restore, which I had done before many times with no issues. This time, I lost most of my colors. I forget which ones now...then I moved and haven't touched it until today. So it has been unplugged since May/06.

I figured I would just reformat it, so I went online and found a tutorial on how to do this. I started up the machine and this came up. Operating system not found. It was a black screen, white lettering. Figured this is due to being unplugged for so long?

The tutorial said to insert the boot disk into the floppy drive. I had lost the boot disk, so went to bootdisk.com and downloaded it onto my other machine, an XP machine. However, it does not have a floppy drive, so I burned the ISO to a cd.

I have the win98SE full disks, so no issue with that.

I tried to boot the system, by pressing F9 like the tutorial said, although I am sure it was f10 that got me into the bios...the F9 didn't work, so I did the F10 and that worked.

I got into bios and on one screen it said that Primary Master ( none ), Primary Slave ( none ) etc. etc...everything had ( none ) beside it. Went to the top of the screen, located the word BOOT. opened that. It gave a list with ATAPI at the top and instructions to the right on how to expand tree etc..

I couldn't figure out anything in either of those and I went to the tutorial on here on installing win98Se and the screen shots look way different than what I was getting up on mine. I am not sure if I am in the right place then on my machine?

I was trying to figure out how to get the CD drive to start instead of the floppy drive, sinc ethe files are on the cd boot disk.

When I start the system up, it appears that the floppy is working as it does make noise and lights up etc.

I think if I can get past this first few issues, the tutorial will be awesome ( the one posted on here ).

If anyone has any ideas on what I am doing wrong, please let me know...:-)

If you need any further information, let me know too.

System is a Compaq Presario, bios is Phoenix Bios.

Thanks for helping.
Sincerely, AnEnigma.

Edited by AnEnigma, 29 August 2006 - 02:08 AM.

[Advertisements]

You can find out what the problems is on the computer with a Knoppix Linux bootable CD. If the knoppix CD halts on booting the hard drive in the computer has probably died. Knoppix needs the HD to place temp files on.

A boot disk does not need a HD to boot to the "a" prompt. Doing a A> C command should let you see the "C" drive. If you get a error either the motherboard IDE bios info has been lost or the HD is dead. If you get to the C drive type in dir and hit the enter key to see if any files are there.


http://www.shockfami...cedric/knoppix/

SRX660

[SRX660]

You can find out what the problems is on the computer with a Knoppix Linux bootable CD. If the knoppix CD halts on booting the hard drive in the computer has probably died. Knoppix needs the HD to place temp files on.

A boot disk does not need a HD to boot to the "a" prompt. Doing a A> C command should let you see the "C" drive. If you get a error either the motherboard IDE bios info has been lost or the HD is dead. If you get to the C drive type in dir and hit the enter key to see if any files are there.


http://www.shockfami...cedric/knoppix/

SRX660