Non-system disk error

Hello everyone. This one is rather interesting problem. This is a 1995 made Packard Bell and buddy of mine gave it to me to fix it. Upon booting, system sees the HD and the Floppy but then it says Non-system disk, please replace and hit any key. Well I know normally that is because you have the wrong floppy disk in there, but this is not the case here. I even swapped the cable with a good on it and the same thing happened. I installed a good floppy drive still same thing. I even made it so it does not boot from the floppy and it still gives me the same error. Then I unplugged the HD and made it to boot from A: only, and now it says the drive A: is not ready. The machine sees the drives but for some reason it refuses to boot from either one. I have been in the BIOS and I don't see anything out of the ordinary. I appreciate any input you may have. Thank you. Ls

 

Hmmmm....do you have the A: drive connected to the right connector on the cable? There is a cut and twist portion of the cable that denotes where the A: drive should be connected. Also, if the cable is on backwards the LED on the drive will stay on continuously. Was there originally a diskette in the drive when you were trying to boot?

 

I sometimes got those errors with my old compaq because of the HD. Check in the bios to make sure your computer didn't decide to forget about your HD. (make sure primary master is auto detect or if already so and says nothing is there then you need to put in the cylinders, heads ect. manually)

 

Hey guys thank you very much for your advice. I took everything apart and put it back together and now it seems to work fine. LS