Boot Disk Not Recognized! Reasons?

[Rubicone]

I created a boot disk in DOS with the command FoRMAT A:/S and confirmed that the disk is in fact bootable. When I try to boot another system which has no OS, the hard is yet to be partitioned and formatted. My boot sequence is floppy, hard drive, and, CD-RW. The disk only has COMMAND.COM on it. I tried a second disk and got the same results.
The error message reads:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.

I press enter and the message repeats itself.

 

[Ladi]

Are you absolutely certain that the 2nd system is booting off the floppy? IE, is the floppy drive known working, does the read light come on and do you hear access noises when the system boots?

~Ladi

 

[Rubicone]

I see the indicator light which is always on but in terms of those noises the answer is a no. Everything about this system is new so unless this floppy drive is exceptionally quiet perhaps something is wrong. The BIOS, though, recognizes it. What now?

 

[Ladi]

Try flipping the floppy cable around. Sounds like you've put it in upside down, which is what causes the light to be on all the time.

~Ladi

 

[Rubicone]

The error message has disappeared but now I cannot get to an A prompt from the boot disk. The screen has my various drives at the top portion and the PCI device listing below and at the bottom a blinking horizontal cursor. Now what do I do? (By the way thanks for helping and good luck in the legal profession-any area you're specializing in?Don't go away just yet).

 

[Ladi]

Give a shot at using one of the general-purpose bootdisks from bootdisk.com. Any of the standard DOS or win98 bootdisks should serve your purpose just fine. (and thanks for the luck...i'm going after corporate and/or intellectual property )

~Ladi

 

[Rubicone]

I tried it and did not work.I got the non-system disk error message again. Reason(s), other suggestion(s)? When do a warm boot I get back at the screen listin my drives and PCI...

 

[Ladi]

Are you sure you created the bootdisks from bootdisk.com properly? Everything from there is definitely bootable, so you shouldn't be getting errors about non-system disks.

The listing of PCI devices and such is just your bios booting...

~Ladi

 

[Rubicone]

Time 10:15 - I retried again after doing a second download and I got the error messsage IVALID SYSTEM DISK. Is it the BIOS? Perhaps the file is being corrupted somehow.I am at a loss. Any more ideas.

Time 10:51 - I created a startup disk on the laptop I am using and tried booting up with it. I got the message starting up WINDOWS '95. Hooray! I GOT TO AN A PROMPT! Swapped this diskette for the one I originally created in DOS typed DIR and could see the files I had created. Then I attempted to switch drives to copy the BIOS file onto the diskette and could not find the CD-ROM drive after having gone through every available letter in the alphabet. Time to check those data cables again?Ladi, where are you now that I need you once again. Beauty sleep?

 

[airfoil]

Rubicone,
You need a boot disk that will boot up the CDROM drive as well. Try making a boot floppy from Win98 or if you can, go to the bios, cheange the boot sequence so the CD drive boots first and then you should be able to perform whatever it is you want to do from the dos prompt. Select Boot from CDROM and then select 'Start computer with CDROM support'.

 

[Rubicone]

I know where to change the boot sequence but where is "start computer with
CD-ROM support"?I do not seem to have that option in my Setup where is it in yours?

 

[Ladi]

A win98 boot floppy will have an option to boot with CDROM support. You can then use that same diskette to fdisk. If you're planning on installing an OS with fat32 support, you can also use that disk to format, otherwise you'd be better off getting format.exe from a regular dos boot floppy and formatting with that (to fat16) or if you're going NT/2K, use the boot floppies for those respective OS's to format into NTFS (or fat32 if you're going with that for 2k).

~Ladi

 

[Rubicone]

I am still only able to boot with the Windows 95 startup diskette I created.For some perplexing reason(s) all other boot disks do not work(they all work fine on the laptop but not this all new desktop), the ones I created in DOS as well as those Win98SE I downloaded from Bootdisk.com . I am thinking of simply copying files from the WIN 98 SE boot-up to the WIN 95 one. Are all those files necessary I am thinking of only copying the ones necessary to access the CD-RW?
Update I tried the above and failed seems a number of files in the CONFIG.SYS were corrupted.
I have since downloaded a boot disk from bootdisk.com and unsure how to execute it.I tried from the A prompt 98BOT10A.EXE and pressed enter and did not work. Then I tried,again from an A prompt 98BOT10A.EXE C: and that did not work. Some paramaters were displayed /d (display image), /s (suppress overwrite),and, /t (test image file integrity). When I tried the 2nd command I also got the message "diskette in drive c: is about to be overwritten with new information.Do you wish to continue (y/n)?" What are the consequences of saying yes?