Old IBM problems, help wanted

[Lowlife443]

I have this old IBM Personal Computer 750 and I decided to take a look at it today, I booted it up and I got a screen that said "Insert the Reference Diskette into the default drive, and then press F1" could anyone help me out? I don't really know a great deal about what I'm doing to say the least heh. I'm pretty sure that the hard drive was wiped, and I don't have an OS to put on it yet, so is that all I need to do is get an OS disk and use it?

[Paleo Pete]

The reference disk is what IBM used on their PS/1 and PS/2 computers, and apparently some other models I'm not aware of. It has the equivalent of CMOS on it, for some reason they chose to keep the configuration on the machine and the interface to configure it with on floppy. I suppose that way the system administrator would be the only one with the ability to make BIOS/CMOS changes, since he was the only one in possession of the reference disk.

I poked around for a few minutes, but didn't find much for reference disks, one interesting result Google (http://www.google.com) turned up was the link to the reference disk for the PS/2 model 80 (http://www.can.ibm.com/helpware/8580.html) I have sitting here behind me...

Look around both by Google and the IBM site, if and when you find a reference disk read the information supplied along the way and it should also point you to a README file or online instructions on how to use it. Basically you boot the computer to that floppy and it drops you right in the big middle of the CMOS settings. That's very simplified, but should get the general idea across.

The reference disk and OS have little to do with each other, the reference disk takes care of the hardware configuration which sets the hardware up so it all [s]ishould[/i] be available for use by the OS.

[Lowlife443]

Thanks a bunch, wish me well in my search for a reference disk. ^-^