Problems With a boot disk

[Flea Bass Pro]

hey everybody

i have a problem. i just got this old Micro City 486 from my uncle, and he completely erased the harddrive and forgot to make a boot disk. It has a cd drive, 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 floppy. this thing is ancient! whenever i start it up, i have a boot disk that i downloaded from bootdisk.com or something like that. its for dos 6, so im going to put windows 3.1 on it, (so i dont put any strain on its tiny 1 gig harddrive lol.) the problem is that for a while the thing was giving me the Illegal System Disk: Replace and press any Key error. then just a few minutes ago it said "Drive Not Ready error: Insert a BOOT disk and press enter."

the thing is that this thing has the 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 drives, and what it looks like is its searching the 5 1/4 for a boot disk, which i do not have in 5 1/4 size. In the BIOS i have tried changing the 3 1/2 to the drive that it wants to search, but i cant get it to work. The 3 1/2 is drive B and the 5 1/4 is drive A, i disconnected the 5 1/4 and it still does not work. Can someone help!?

karl

 

[Mirage]

you have disconnected the 5.25 floppy...
have you tried putting the 3.5 floppy in place of the 5.25?im not sure if it will fit.my cable from a PC which has 5.25 has a plug that can fit in a 5.25 and a plug that can fit to a 3.5.if you have as well try swithing the two so that the BIOS will try reading the 3.5 instead of the 5.25.

 

[dethangel]

the cmos automatically looks for boot disks in drive a, so either

1) access cmos and change the drive config
2) switch the cables around, i know best buy sells adapters

 

[CrashAbbott]

retire it and pick up a pentium 100 to replace,,

those old systems are a headache now!