[ahayes]

Hi. I live in Papua New Guinea, in the South Pacific. Hard to get technical assistance here.
I have a 1994 486 which came with a 270 MB hard disk. Installed a new motherboard in 1997.
Bought a secondhand 630 MB hard disk in Australia a while ago and have tried to install it today - Christmas Day, great time to be needing technical help!
Not knowing how to do this properly I just unplugged the old disk and plugged in the new one and started up.
BIOS started up OK and then message "Missing Operating System".
Booted up with a boot disk in A: drive and checked DIR for new disk and found only command.com file, nothing else listed.
Rebooted with MSDOS6.22 setup disk but MSDOS would not install - message saying that MSDOS already installed.
Thinking there was some kind of clash between the command.com file and the MSDOS install disk, like a fool I then deleted the command.com file on the new hard disk and tried again to install MSDOS but it would not install - message says I need an upgrade disk, but if there is an existing version of DOS on the new hard disk I don't know where it is as DIR now says file not found.
I put my old hard disk back in and it started up OK again.
Now with the "new" disk in place I have tried starting up with Windows 95 and 98 startup disks but no joy - I can't get an A: prompt.
Also the "new" drive keeps spinning constantly.
What should I do next?

[Dan O]

My first question is the drive jumpered and connected correctly?

I recommend you read:
http://www.hp.com/cposupport/informa.../lpg67003.html

Once you are sure and the drive is not constantly spinning boot with a floppy with the OS you want to install. Run FDISK on the new drive and delete all partitions and recreate the partition(s) you want. Next format it using" FORMAT C:\ /S. Then install your OS.

Good luck and Merry Christmas. Dan-O

[ahayes]

Thanks Dan-O, so far so good.
I have repartitioned the HDD and formatted it and installed MSDOS6.22
However the HDD still keeps spinning all the time (LED is on all the time, whereas when I tested my old HDD again the LED blinked on and off when the drive was spinning).

[LarryCore]

Is this drive connected to a CD, or is it just the HDD alone?

You said you have a new motherboard... did you connect the LED plugs yourself? You may have put the HDD light on backwards.

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[This message has been edited by LarryCore (edited 01-03-2001).]

[Steven715]

Have you setup the drive propley in the bios as some times thay will go ahed and see the drive is ok to use but the drive pramiters are not correct so it comes up the message Missing opperating system

and you can access the drive but not all of it in writing when you use win 95 Fdisk it might see it as 270 MB hd
using the bios settings can i ask what dose the cmos setup look like?



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