PC Help - Non system disk error

[Methais]

A friend of mine with some 7 or so year old shitty Compaq is getting the "Non system disk" error when he tries to boot up. The only thing is he doesn't have any disks in the drive. I changed the setting so that it would try and boot off the hard drive first anyway, but it would still give that message. Tried to boot off his system restore CD too and got the same error message.

Anyone know what it usually means when you get this error when you don't have any disks in any drives and/or what can be done? I've never seen this happen before.

[Gan]

Sounds like his hard drive has taken a dump on him.

[Celephais]

Non-System Disk error can happen when the boot drive (which includes hard drives) is not reading as a bootable drive. This can happen if his hard drive crashed and shit the bed. It's possible some of the data is recoverable on the drive, but the boot sector is wasted.

[Celephais]

As for booting off the system restore, obviously make sure it attempts to boot off that drive first, and it also depends on how shitty of a system restore disk it is (some system restore disks aren't really boot disks).

[Methais]

I figured it would be the hard drive, but even if the hard drive was bad, shouldn't it be able to boot off a disk? Though if you're right about the system restore disk possibly not being a boot disk I guess that would make sense. I set it to try and boot off the CD first too, with no luck so yeah it's probably not a boot disk. He didn't have a floppy to try booting off of, but assuming he did, that should work to boot off of even if his hard drive is dead right?

[Sean of the Thread]

At 7 years old the restore disk might be shit by now. Make a new and try it first. It's probably time to start fresh unless he has nude pictures of his first girlfriend on the pos.

[Celephais]

For the cost of harddrives relative to the cost of your time (at least I hope this is true), just have him buy a new hard drive (IDE obviously). You could get any data off the original by getting either an external enclosure (as cheap as $20 to free w/rebate) or having it be a slave drive, if it's a standard ATX PC he should have a free IDE slot or two.

[Gan]

The PC is 7 years old. Go out and pick up a new one for a few extra bucks... Then slave the old HD and pull your data off, if its still readable.

[Celephais]

The PC is 7 years old. Go out and pick up a new one for a few extra bucks... Then slave the old HD and pull your data off, if its still readable.

While obviously the way to go if you can afford it, 7 year old PCs are surprisingly useful... I've got an old P3 733 (circa 1999) that runs Win Server 2k3 and it makes a beautiful server box, and I have it running applications well beyond most peoples "email/internet" level of demand.

And I'm sure there are people here on the PC playing GS on even older machines (I remember someone using some really old box to MA a ton of characters... )

[Drew2]

No, at 7 years old it's a piece of shit. There's no two ways about it. Congratulations on using a piece of shit as a server, because everyone definitely needs a server.

[Skirmisher]

No, at 7 years old it's a piece of shit. There's no two ways about it. Congratulations on using a piece of shit as a server, because everyone definitely needs a server.Older computers can still serve a purpose though.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130793/article.html

[Drew2]

The percentage of households that would/can/have any reason to utilize that is very small.

And Skirm, from what I remember, your computer (read: hamster on a wheel) could do with an upgrade too, unless you already have.

[Skirmisher]

The percentage of households that would/can/have any reason to utilize that is very small.

And Skirm, from what I remember, your computer (read: hamster on a wheel) could do with an upgrade too, unless you already have.

:(

[Sean of the Thread]

I utilize old machines as servers too :(

<--nerd

[Daniel]

How do you guys sort through all that porn

[Kranar]

Haha many people use old machines as servers too, don't feel bad at all.

Many companies in fact will cluster together a bunch of old computers together since typically 5-10 crappy computers clustered together costs significantly less than a modern computer and will significantly outperform it too.

But back to the problem, consensus seems sound here, get a new drive and use the old one as a secondary drive. Make sure to get an OS disk to install on the new drive.

[Gan]

And Skirm, from what I remember, your computer (read: hamster on a wheel) could do with an upgrade too, unless you already have.


:(

:rofl:

PWNNNED.

**
The only reason I'd keep an old box around is for my kid to use/destroy as he's learning how to operate a PC and to play his games on. They are just too cheap nowdays to run the basic household/personal (read: non-ultrageek) applications on.

[Mistomeer]

Methais, Restore defaults in the bios and see what you get.

If all you're doing is Internet/email, then a PIII box works fine. Of course, you can pick up those boxes for $20 off ebay -

http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-Netvista-Desktop-6579-1-0GHz-128Ram-20Gb-W98-COA_W0QQitemZ280112402197QQihZ018QQcategoryZ140073 QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I use them for firewalls ($20 PC running $30,000 firewall FTW), but I too am a nerd.

[Sean of the Thread]

So off topic now but I use box for my kids to soley use MSPAINT. One box is a proxy server and one box is a storage server.


RECYCLE!

[Celephais]

Yeah, old boxes have plenty of use, really the advances between a 7 year old computer when not gaming are painfully small, typical PC usage is still bottlenecked at the hard drive. What's even better is because it uses such "crappy" RAM, you can load it up to max pretty cheap off EBay. If you turn off all the graphical crap like transparent windows or animated dropdown menus, it'll run fine.

[Jazuela]

My old HP Pavilion came with a photo-scanner built into the box. It runs on Win95 and has 40 megs of memory. It's UPGRADED to be a 256, heh. I still use it for the photo-scanner. Unfortunately I have to print from the computer, because it doesn't come with a CD burner, and my current computer doesn't have a floppy drive. I'm not even sure if it would work to port one over to the other even if I could, because I don't think win95 photos can be read by winXP software.

My OLDER computer has win3.11 for workgroups and I still use it to play with dos stuff. Can't play any infocom games on win95 or XP, so the old 386 machine is useful for that. Gotta have my monthly Infidel fix :)

[Sean of the Thread]

Infocom reminds me of Battletech.. yay.

[Celephais]

Jaz you could get a cheap hub or router and put the Win95 computer on the same network as your newer computer (might have to buy a NIC for the older computer too, but still all in very cheap), then you could easily move the files off the old computer after you scan them. Older image formats ("Win 95 photos") would have no problem being read on newer machines.

[Jazuela]

Good point Celephais. I thought originally I'd network the two, but I just never got around to it. I know, without a doubt, that my old 386 won't ever function as anything other than my "Infocom Box" but maybe one of these days I'll grab a cable and get the other two computers networked. On the other hand - maybe I'll just break down and buy another computer that comes with a photo scanner. Do they even make those anymore? I'm talking about a slot that looks like an old 4.25 floppy drive, except instead of a disk, you insert a photograph. When you do that, the software opens up on your monitor to allow you to edit the photo, save it, send it, resize, and do all kinds of fun things with the image.

[Celephais]

I haven't heard of a scanner that specific in some time, but almost all scanners come with software with a "onetouch" feature, which means you hit "scan" and it'll open the assosiated program.

Finding a flatbed scanner would be key.

[Apathy]

Compaq Presario? Hard drives are notorious for shitting out. Get ready to buy a new computer.

[CrystalTears]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v412/Jemah/IM-IN-UR/dinosore.jpg

[Skirmisher]

:(

[DeV]

Infocom reminds me of Battletech.. yay.Without infocom I'd have never started playing Gemstone. I've got nothing but love for that company.