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Unable to boot from A: Drive

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7 replies

by czechmate

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I have an Elite Group K7VZA motherboard running a 1GHz Athalon Thunderbird chip with a Via Chipset, with 2 HDD's (an 80 GB and a 30GB), 512Mb Ram, and running Win98 SE. The FDD is known to be good and I have a known good Win98 SE boot disk. The system will not boot from the floppy. System is set to boot from A: then C: then LS120 (other boot devices are enabled). System will boot from HDD or CD but no matter the configuration, it will not boot from the FDD. Error msg is Non-system Disk. Once system boots FDD works fine. Any suggestions PLEASE!!!

7 replies

by thechas

Have you verified that the startup disk functions on another PC?

You can have all the files, but the disk is NOT bootable just from having the correct files.

The disk needs to be formated as a bootable disk, or you need to run the system command (sys a:) in order top make the disk bootable.

Chas

by czechmate

The startup disk was formatted as a startup disk on the machine that won't boot from the FDD and was used successfully to boot another machine.

by hereinoz

Try another DOS boot disk. The fact that it is reporting Non System Disk means that the machine is clearly not picking it as a bootable disk. Could be the boot sector is damaged but the disk will work fine otherwise.

Chas is right. Try the disk in another machine, and also try another boot disk in that drive. Also try that drive in another machine.

One slight possibility is a BIOS error that is not allowing the system to "see" the floppy drive, but Windows will address it, once booted- unlikely, but just a thought.

by czechmate

Tried another known good Boot disk with same result. Also used the disk in question to boot a different machine successfully. You may have an idea with the BIOS glitch.

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