Mainboard bios keeps me from loading WIN95 - HELP !!

[Neos]

I hope I am not in the wrong forum. Here goes.

I have an older system that was given to me, and I am trying to load WIN95 on it. I have copied all the cabs to the 1 Gig formatted HD, used my start up disc to get to C: ...started the load from the C: drive.

All does well till it reboots, and it stops because there is this 'hold control to boot from floppy' that comes up. It stops me right there - will not go back to the C: drive to finish Windows.

Any ideas. I know that I am missing a simple thing.

Thanks for any and all help.

Andrew in AL

 

[KF]

I am going to guess that the HD may not have a correct boot sector. It needs that to bootstrap load the OS (MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS for Win95). If the BIOS does not find a valid boot sector on the boot HD, it may give a message like this. OTOH, I have seen dummy boot sectors (on floppies) that give a message like this. They have an apparently valid boot sector, but no actual bootstrap loader.

To put a boot sector on the HD, run "sys a: c:" from a boot floppy (one that really boots).

 

[Neos]

I will give that a try.

It just came to me that I really might go through the complete routine of deleting and redoing all the partitions using fdisk, and then format again. What I did before was just format the drive, and then go for the download.

Any wisdom in this?

Neos

 

[KF]

Originally posted by: Neos
I will give that a try.

It just came to me that I really might go through the complete routine of deleting and redoing all the partitions using fdisk, and then format again. What I did before was just format the drive, and then go for the download.

Any wisdom in this?

Neos

If there is nothing to save, that's what I would do. If the drive is of unknown origin, it could have something odd or confusing like drive compression or a drive manager (for systems that won't recognize drives over 512M for instance) installed. The American manufacturers have a free drive setup program for their drives at their site you can download. These generally have an option somewhere for getting rid of "drive managers" installed on the HD, or putting a drive manager on the HD if the system requires it.

 

[SinfulWeeper]

Another possability is that you have virus protection enabled in the BIOS. That will prevent a new OS no matter what the type from loading up. But I mainly only see that option in newer motherboards.