No boot error message when non-system floppy disk is in A Drive

[Guest]

I have installed SP2. I accidentally left a non-system floppy disk in my A
drive. When I restarted, it would hang up with just a blinking cursor and no
message.
I thought I had a motherboard problem until I disconnected the A drive and
it rebooted fine. Then I discovered the floppy disk in the drive. Very
frustrating.

Was the error message we used to receive when a non-system floppy was in the
A drive removed with SP2?

 

[Sharon F]

I have installed SP2. I accidentally left a non-system floppy disk in my A
drive. When I restarted, it would hang up with just a blinking cursor and no
message.
I thought I had a motherboard problem until I disconnected the A drive and
it rebooted fine. Then I discovered the floppy disk in the drive. Very
frustrating.

Was the error message we used to receive when a non-system floppy was in the
A drive removed with SP2?

Was there an error? What was on the floppy disk? If a boot disk, it might
get started but stop without an error if it failed to load all of the way.
Or it may still have been loading when you gave up. Windows would not have
been loaded so no error messages would appear from it.

If not a boot disk, an error message about "no operating system found"
would come from the system itself - not from Windows.

A check for a non-system disk at shutdown... I've never seen Windows warn
about this but, when capable, have seen such warnings appear from an
installed antivirus program.

 

[Guest]

There was no error. The screen was blank and the cursor was flashing. The
disk contained just photos, and no system. Normally I expect to get a
message that I should install a system disk, but there was no message. I
thought I had a motherboard problem, however, removing the disk and
restarting, fixed the problem.

 

[Sharon F]

There was no error. The screen was blank and the cursor was flashing. The
disk contained just photos, and no system. Normally I expect to get a
message that I should install a system disk, but there was no message. I
thought I had a motherboard problem, however, removing the disk and
restarting, fixed the problem.

Your system is set to boot from floppy disk first, then hard drive. That's
why removing the disk and restarting worked. I have no idea why your BIOS
did not give you an error message as it should have.