battery

[JAYDALOSS]

I Notice on these oldcomputers its hardto get a prompt on a start up disk Could that be because maybe the battery is weak and might needreplacement

 

[Him]

No

It's only hard if you dont know how to do it. A weak battery would only not save CMOS and BIOS information, causing you to have to reconfig your bios each time you turned on your computer.

 

[JAYDALOSS]

then why cant i get a prompt on a startup disk it doesnt happen on all old computers just this one for now.Does anybody know the answer

 

[timmer]

all motherboards are different

 

[macdude425]

Well, you're being kinda vague...are you trying to boot off a startup disk and it won't come to a command prompt?

Make sure floppy (or CD, whichever) is set to first boot device in BIOS.

 

[Him]

all motherboards are different

That has no corelation to anything in this scenario. All motherboards may be different, but they are all on the same standards. If you CORRECTLY make a bootable disc, you set the boot priority in the BIOS to Floppy first and let it boot to that. After doing some things, it will come to a command prompt, whereas all drives are bumped up one drive letter, assuming you made a disk with an MS RAMDrive. If no RAMDrive was made, than everything will stay the same. You will know if you made a disc with no RAM Drive, as you cannot do that within Windows and have to get a third party disc.

The process for booting from a floppy is the same on all PC's, regardless of the year or the motherboard or anythign else.

 

[JAYDALOSS]

Well i just made a disk in windows 98 add remove programs create startup disk Whats the ram drive I know the boot up sequence has to be floppy first

 

[Him]

Nevermind about the RAMdrive, I probably just confused you. You dont need to pay attention to that. If you do look closely when it is booting from the disk, it will say things about the RAMdrive and initializing it.

Just set the boot priority, and boot from the disk. Simple it is, simple.

 

[JAYDALOSS]

Well in a lot of cases it never goes to them choices where you can format and fdisk etc. the boot disk is made properly and the boot sequence is set to floppy It doesnt go off in some computers
something is missing And i notice this sometimes it does go off in a computer at one time but it may not do it the next time you try it

 

[Him]

Well, if it sometimes boot than the disk is faulty or the drive or something is faulty.

It dosent come up with a menu asking what you want to do, it comes up with a command line (C:\>) and you have to type in commands. FDISK to partition it, Format c: to format it, and a few other ones.