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Non system disk or disk error

You could be getting this message for a number of reasons. Most likely is that you have left a floppy disk in the drive, if this is the case then just remove it and strike any key. You can prevent this from happening in the future by going into BIOS setup and changing the boot sequence so that BIOS tries to boot from your hard drive first. In fact this is advisable because it will help to prevent your computer from becoming infected by a boot sector/MBR infecting virus.
If you want to, you can change the non system disk message a floppy disk generates by using a program I wrote called Disk Message. It's available as freeware from the My Software area, it's in the GUI section.

If you haven't left a disk in the drive, then you will need to get or make yourself a boot disk with scandisk.exe and sys.com on it. The boot disk must be from the exact same version of DOS you have on the hard drive, unless it's a version of DOS which does not have scandisk. If that is the case then you need two boot disks, one with scandisk the other with the version of DOS you have. You should boot your machine with the boot disk from the correct version of DOS before using sys.
Start the machine using the boot disk then run scandisk on drive C, make sure that you do a surface check as well. If all goes well then exit from scandisk and type "sys c:" and hit enter. Hopefully your machine should now boot from the hard drive again.

You can find information about entering BIOS setup in the BIOS section of this FAQ. You will also find information on how to make a boot disk (and where to download one) in the Setting Up DOS area.

Copyright © Jonathan Fox 2001.