Hi ev 1.
Long story short - Kids crashed their old pc ( win98se ). D:\, ( their cdrom drive ) had dissapeared and display settings gone weird.
After checking it all over ( in bits..lol ) i formatted it, as i've done on a few pc's.I've got my win 98 disk,and the startup floppy. Anyway,all seemed ok,looked in fdisk,all ok, one system,fat32 etc BUT i couldn't access E:\ to re install 98. After messing with another cdrom(jumper settings) and all the IDE cables etc,it 'found' the cdrom.Installed.Great.
But...now on startup ( with no disks in ) it gives me the menu for start with cdrom support etc?? Press ok and it flashes on win 98,then hangs on black screen saying 'not ready reading drive a:\,please insert disk, abort,retry,fail.'
So i press 'a' and off she goes and loads as normal, with the floppy wizzing round,empty.

More annoying than a problem, just wondered if anyone could shed any light on it?

Cheers, Dave.

Welcome to D-A-L.

It sounds as though the startup floppy boot files (containing commands specific to floppy operation) have been transferred to the hard disk. This confuses the system as it's not starting from the floppy.

In Windows, click Start, Run, type in msconfig. When it opens, on the General tab, remove the check marks from;

Process Config.sys file
Process Autoexec.bat file

Exit msconfig and do a full restart or shutdown.

Post back with your results.

Hi Dan, thanks for replying.
I searched t'net and found basicaly the same fix as you suggest,although i had to 'ren' ?! Config.sys, Autoexec.bat whilst in dos mode - booting from '98 startup floppy.
Works fine now. Cheers

The "... So i press 'a' and off she goes and loads as normal, ..." lead me to believe you had access to Windows, otherwise I would have given you the DOS commands (that you eventually found). ;>)

None the less, I'm glad to hear you're up and running.