when the computer starts up it acts as if it has a floppy disk the the floppy disk drive. giving the message like the wrong startup disk is in the drive and say remove it and press any button to continue, but there is no disk in the drive and the computer won't go any further.

Well, as no-one has replied for nearly a month, I hope you've managed to find the answer somewhere else!

Your problem is very simple to diagnose. The BIOS has not detected your hard disk or it has detected the hard disk but you no longer have any partitions on it for some reason. Therefore, your floppy drive is the only drive that it knows how to start from. As you have no boot disk inserted in your floppy drive, it has nothing to start from and so it reports an invalid startup disk.

If you still have the problem, please follow my instructions about Auto-detecting drives in the 'Members PC Help Articles' section of this forum.

Let us know how you get on (we'll reply much more quickly next time)