Operating system not found

I have an ancient laptop that I am hoping to resurrect for simple web-browsing on my home ADSL line - it is a Pentium II 333MHz Windows 98SE machine, so it should be able to cope with that…

It seems that the hard drive’s boot sector has become corrupt, so I am trying to get it to boot from the Windows disk or CD so that I can re-install the OS onto the hard drive, but keep getting the above message. The boot process starts as normal, then I get a message about the hard drive not being installed and if the OS is not found to please reinstall the hard drive - F1 to resume, F2 to Enter Setup. Pressing F1 leads to the BIOS Utility display screen for a moment, and then to the “Operating system not found” message.

Any suggestions as to how I might proceed would be welcomed.

Grim

Hit F2 (or was it F1? You’re not clear on that) next time, and when in the bios change the boot order so the CD is before the hard disk. Then exit and reboot from the Windows CD.

Well f*ck me - that worked.

Why didn’t it work with the CD and no floppy in the A: drive? I thought the boot order meant that it would look at the floppy drive first and then proceed to the CD (or whatever the order was until it found something it could boot from…

Grim

The hard disk was a bootable device - it must have found an MBR - but some vital component of the OS was missing.

The boot order was [ol][li]Floppy[]CD[]Hard disk[*]Network[/ol]I would have thought this would bypass the faulty harddrive. I had put the Startup disk in the floppy drive to no avail and also tried it with the floppy drive empty and the Windows CD in the CD drive without success.[/li]
Anyway, it’s (slowly) re-installing Windows now…

Thanks,
Grim