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> I rebooted the laptop to test it, and it said," Please insert disk and press
> enter."
>
> I thought there might be something wrong with the boot sector, so I tried to
> install Windows 95 without Internet Exploder (there's about 15 floppies),
> and whenever it tries to scan the hard disk for errors and such after
> formatting, it fails. I tried this with 2.1gb hard drive and the same thing
> happened.

Have you checked CMOS settings to see if the hard drive is recognized and
set to boot?  Linux can find drives that the BIOS has not been told are
there.  A 200MHz computer may not automatically detect the hard drives.

 

The BIOS does detect the hard drive, and the CMOS settings has the hard drive as the primary boot device.

You can download a freedos boot floppy, then test your drives by making a
small DOS primary partition (use DOS fdisk and format), boot with DOS
floppy, sys c:, see if it boots to hard drive.  Much quicker than Windows.
Does Win95 startup disk have fdisk, format and sys?

I'll have to try the boot floppy and see if it boots from the hard drive. If not, I'll search around my parts bin for another drive.
 

I have run into lots of hard drives that won't boot.  We fixed one
recently by typing fdisk /mbr from DOS - partition table was messed up.
Others simply have wornout boot sectors.

 
I think the boot sector is either worn out or corrupt on both hard drives, but this computer apparently wasn't used very often and only had one install of Windows 95 on it, so I don't see why it would be.

If you have a CD_ROM drive you can try installing basiclinux to CD.
Someone posted the proper image.  (Where and who?).  Not all older laptops
will boot from CD-ROM but you can run Smart Boot Manager to fix that.
(One of my computers won't even work with SBM.)  Some will boot from
CD-ROM but not syslinux (used by DSL).  They all like LILO.

 
It has a CD-ROM but the BIOS no longer registers the IDE channel the CD-ROM is on (some sort of motherboard failure), so it doesn't work. If the CD drive did work, I'd try DSL or PuppyLinux, but I'm limited to booting from floppy disks.

Sindi

Joe