help wit old 100mhz bios

[evildoughboi]

hello. im workin wit a 100mhz comp wit 16mb ram.......
well the comp works buh i cant get it to boot from floppy or cdrom even wen i put in bootable floppy and cd. the hdd is 20gb and has xp on it. i wanna boot from floppy den format den install linux. buh no can do. i accessed all the menus and i only found 1 dat mite be of some help. its boot sequence, buh it only has "c,a" or "a,c". ne1 knos wuh dat means? i tried help buh dats no help either. so ne1 got ne suggestions? ne help wud be gladly appreciated.

 

[Mulga]

Boot sequence should be "a,c"
a is the floppy drive, c is the hard drive. It would probably be much too old to boot from a CD ROM but should boot ok from a floppy if you set the boot sequence as above.

 

[evildoughboi]

alrite well i tried to set it at "a, c" for boot sequence and it still wun work. i have xp installed on it, and it has an error msg b4 it even goes to da xp screen: ntldr is missing.... mite be dat da system is not da same as wen i installed it since i installed xp from a newer comp, den changed it to an older old comp. in addition i dun see my cd rom in da system config box rite afta it initializes all da drives. and weneva i start it says "initialize plug and play devices." ne more suggestions?? any help wud be gladly appreciated.

 

[attrofy]

XP won't boot a disk or CD. The only luck I have had is to put a 98 boot disk in, then run from the DOS prompt. IF you are trying to install Linux from a floppy, this may cause some problems (trying to access to OS floppies from only one drive).
The only choice you may have is to partition your disk with something like partition magic. The problem with this is you will have to format your HD and reinstal XP.

Have you had any problems running XP?? The system requirements seem a little low. I just checked Microsoft's web site. They say minimum requirement for XP is 233 MHz with 64MB Ram. However, I have found that the minimum requirements are not always true.

If you are trying to make a linux box, just reformat the HD with partion Magic and set the entire disk to a linux partition. Then XP won't be an issue.

 

[evildoughboi]

alrite now i formatted the 20 gb hdd which used to have xp on it. i made it boot floppy first. still does not work
i've tried 4 diff boot disks and its not working. i also replaced the floppy with another 1. it mite be the configuratoin of power plugs buh i wudnt exactly know how it sud be plugged in. any ideas??? ne help wud be highly appreciated.

 

[attrofy]

What did you use to format it with???? If you did it from within XP, you formated it with the XP command.com - in other words, it is expecting to find XP. Do you have partitin magic or a win 98/95 boot disk??? If you have one of those, you should be able to boot off of that floppy, and run fdisk (you may have to download it off the net as I don't think it is on the boot disk). If you can't do that, see if you can find the mfg of your HD and see if they have a disk utility online. If you can find all of that, you ought to be able to remove the XP partition (hopefully). If none of that works, your going to have to find either partition magic, or find the install disk for XP, and format the partition of the HD back to FAT16 (unless it is already), then you still need to find something that you can boot to.
Just to make sure, your bios does have A: set as the first boot device, right? Also, are you sure that that drive works?? Were you able to acess a file off of that drive before you wiped XP? If youdon't know, put it into a PC that you know works, and check it on that machine. Check the cable too.

 

[evildoughboi]

i had formated the hdd from a newer comp im using rah now. i ran it from win 98 and formated from there. i also tried win98, win95, partition magic, and dos 6.22 startup disk... and nuthing. dose were the 4 diff disks i tried. wen the comp starts, i dun hear dat floppy noise weneva it reads a floppy. and im fairly sure that the cables r all plugged in. the hdd is fully functional since i recently copied files from it, deleted folders/files, and den formated it. the hdd was always in fat32 format, never switched to ntfs. im not so g'd wit old bios' buh according to previous threads, i set it for the comp to boot from floppy. ne other suggestions?

 

[moxiespal]

If you don't have "C,A, AND D or Q" as boot sequence options in the BIOS, then you cdrom driver is not loaded and you will need the file "Mscdex" to load the cdrom driver. NTFS is more stable than FAT32.

 

[evildoughboi]

well how could i load the cdrom driver? i cant even access ms dos. ne1 wit ne other suggestions to boot this comp into ms dos? any help highly appreciated.

 

[attrofy]

Maybe I wasn't clear, I meant did you know if the floppy drive worked, not the HD, before you formated. You may have to throw in another floppy drive that you know works (cables and all) and make sure that isn't the problem.
Also, if your BIOS is that old, you may not have a choice to boot from CD-ROM. You may only have A:, C:, SCSI Device.

What kind of message (if any) are you getting when the computer boots up? Are you just getting a " > " for a prompt?

Try a floppy drive with a cable out of a machine that you know works. Does your bios even see the floppy drive? Also, when you formated the HDD did you use the "/s" option?

 

[evildoughboi]

most dings has to be mauallie put in.... and floppies are selected... and i tired it on my newer comp and found out floppys dead d=( both of dem! well im goin to try to pull out da 1 from da newer 1 and see if it works from there.... thanks for the speculation. also it says "invalid system disk... press any button to retry" its similar to dat message.

 

[jrjuiliano]

One thing you have to remember is that on the older drives they won't see anything over about 500 Mb to 6 Gb. This will cause errors on disks like crazy. I had the same problem with a 20 gig hard drive and Pentium 200. You would have to find the maximum size and slice your hard drive into those bits.

The other thing is that Windows XP might not run on that hardware. Most Windoze before XP (2000 and ME in particular) would not run on anything less than 166 MHz machines.

I tried installing Red Hat on my P200 and it was miserable. Anaconda would always crash out on my with fatal errors. It was not until I got newer hardware where everything started to work. J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group

 

[evildoughboi]

buh i heard red hat wud work on very slow machines. so far i juss want to get to dos mode to install red hat. win 95 works on da 100mhz comp, win98 barely works *extremely slow*.

 

[ChrisHirst]

One thing to try before condeming your floppy drive. I build machine for my company and had the same problems with NEW floppy drive and some MB chipsets. The solution seemed to be use the 'B' drive connection on the floppy ( you were using the 'A' connection before?) and then enable the 'Swap Floppy Drive' on the Advanced BIOS Setting menu this worked 9 times out of 10