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Solved Bios Recognizes Hard Drive But Dos Doesnt.

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Hi there. Just formatted my C: on an old 486 and started a fresh install of Windows 3.1, went fine until the restart part. After i restarted the computer, it will not boot to C even though the BIOS recognizes it. I have messed with the boot order and several other bios settings but it will not access the C drive. Any time i start the computer up it says invalid boot disk, whether or not theres a disk in A:, or even if i unplug the drive altogether. The only DOS boot disk i have is for version 3.1, any time i type in C: it says “invalid drive specification”…i know C is there, why wont it recognize it? Specs are 80mhz 486, 1gb hard drive…thanks, hope somebody can help me with this! Driving me crazy…just wanna use windows!

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1 Answer

  1. “Is there a way to partition the drive by hooking it up to a modern PC and then re-installing it?”

    FDISK/Format (partitioning) is best done on the machine the drive will be installed on. Differences in BIOS’s could result in later troubles.

    http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/for…

    ” I have DOS 5 and 6.0, but only upgrades. I’ll have to dig around and find a complete version of dos to upgrade from.”

    Check my previous response on a post for installing DOS 6.22 from upgrade disks. Probably should work on your DOS 6.0 disks:

    https://computing.net/answers/do…

    Again, make sure the drive is correctly setup in the BIOS before proceeding (cylinders/heads/sectors per track). Otherwise you may run into issues with not recognizing the correct size or data corruption may ensue later on. Since you mentioned you “messed with the boot order and several other bios settings”, open the machine up and read this data off of the drive itself or, if not listed, find the manufacturer and model number and search for the correct settings online.

    “Channeling the spirit of jboy…”

    message edited by T-R-A

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