To keep it brief, my work had a small network setup with basic office pc's with Win 98se on them. The people set them up were cowboys...real bad problems since day one. (Works cant locat ethese people anymore..?)

Any way one of the computer was reporting non-system disk etc.. I thought it was corrupt boot files...then it would report "boot failure" cant read from atapi cdrom..? When looking into the bios it hasn't detected HDD when it had before. I tried re-seting to "auto" with no help. Then another pc on the network that had been working fine came up with the same problem. It had lost the HDD. It boots to floppy, and tried SYS c:, no help, as I think there is failing hard drives in the pc's. The weird thing is that it worked the next day according to some one???

Any ideas?

Boot sequence has been set to a:-c: etc.
Always Non-system disk, or boot failure.

Why is it not picking the Hdd drives sometimes...

hi, Dazman.
You might want to find the make of these drives and visit the makers website to get the diagnostics. This will show if you have faulty drives. If all the drives are the same type, it seems unlikely that they are all faulty, but I suppose it could be a bad batch.
Another possibilty is a PSU fault, but again, I can't see that happening on different machines. Is a UPS or surge protector fitted? Spikes are not uncommon in offices. When the machines are working, does anything show up in device manager with errors, which might suggest motherboard drivers.

David

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If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve the man, but disimprove the cat.

Mark Twain

There is no surege protector to my knowledge, and I've checked Device manager before no problems??

The hard drives a have always sounded extra loud, and I've always thought they didn't sound right.....

I' think one of the drives was by "Pc technologies??? or something" I shall try there next..any other Ideas welcome

thanks

A non-system disk error message usually means that the hard drive is corrupted or defective.
First, make sure the hard drive's cables are all securely connected.
If they're ok, then replace the IDE cable.
If no luck, insert the Windows boot floppy, startup, select 'Start Windows Without CD-ROM Support', type C at the A:\> prompt, type fdisk /mbr at the C:\> prompt, press Enter.
If still no luck, remove the boot floppy, start to a Command prompt, type fdisk/status at a C:\> prompt. If you cannot see the hard drive's specs, then it's defective.

Migratory non-systems disk errors on networked computers....run a virus scan, on all the networked machines.

Run the drive diagnostics, as suggested before.

Look into surge protection....

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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

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