non-system disk error

[Daniel Kelly]

I went to restart my computer and at startup I kept
getting a "non-system disk" remove and hit any key error,
but there are no disks in any of the drives. I tried to
restart using the cd-rom as the 1st device with the
operating system disk in the drive, but still nothing
occured. Any help anyone can provide would be greatly
appreciated for I am out of work until I get my computer
back up and working!

 

[Guest]

Chances are your boot record or master boot record is corrupt or missing. Boot with your XP CD or Recovery CD in the drive and when you see a warning or message to boot from CD click any key on the keyboard. You can also try tapping one of the following keys at boot to see if you can get into the recovery console to enter fixmbr which will rewrite a master boot record. F8 gets you to the options window. F6 should load failsafe default settings and F7 should get you the optimized defaults. If the CD isn't working or you are unable to access it then use someone elses computer and go to the Microsoft site and use their tool to make a 6 floppy disk boot set or use one of the sets from this site. http://www.freepctech.com/pc/002/files010.shtml
Good luck.{:~)

 

[Alex Nichol]

I went to restart my computer and at startup I kept
getting a "non-system disk" remove and hit any key error,
but there are no disks in any of the drives. I tried to
restart using the cd-rom as the 1st device with the
operating system disk in the drive, but still nothing
occured. Any help anyone can provide would be greatly
appreciated for I am out of work until I get my computer
back up and working!

If you put floppy first, and try with a floppy in the drive (preferably
a bootable one) do you get anything? And if you boot to BIOS setup and
use IDE Autodetect, does it find the hard drive? If not, then it sounds
like serious hardware ill-health