Very Strange Screen

[gjwilson]

I have a 1993 IBM 486/sx that I have just recently added an overdrive to making it a huge 60mhz. It has been buzzing along fine in all operations until I was using it to clone a small drive. The clone op went fine and I rebooted to set the clone and check out the hdd when this weird screen came up. The comp. started as usual with the IBM screen and memory scan then instead of jumping into Win 95 it brought up a black screen that had the white outline of a floppy drive with an arrow pointing up at it, below that is the outline of a floppy disk and below that is the outline of the F keys with the F1 key depressed. When I put in my 95 boot disk I was able to check out the hdd and it is fine. I thought maybe my bios was blown but I have been able to get into that and it seems ok.I pulled out the overdrive and got the same results and put it back in. Could the original CPU be fried?? I`m at a loss.Gary

[Marty]

I saw the same thing on a similar IBM, I think its the same as "missing operating system", or in other words it didn't recognise the boot sector of the hard drive.
The screen is telling you to boot from floppy

[Pantion]

Got the same problem with my oldie PS/1. The HDD seems to be unbootable. Just copy the system files from the floopy to the HDD and the problem should be fixed.

Also check your BIOS for correct HDD detection! Sometimes it sticks with the old one.

[gjwilson]

The old beast doesn`t want to respond to anything. I even put in another harddrive with a functional OS in it(win95) and it still gives me that weird screen. Gary

[This message has been edited by gjwilson (edited 11-30-1999).]

[Gene C.]

on a lot of olded systems"like mac's for a example" all the system setup files were supplied on a setup floppie, that came with the system. I'll try to get you some more info on this. I have seen this problem before.

[gjwilson]

Thanks..I`ll be patient...it`s (obviously) my backup computer so I`m not hurtin` yet. Gary

[DaddyGoose]

Press F1 as it is booting and see if it by passes the HD and hits the floppy looking for a boot disk....
If so your HD parameters in the BIOS have been scrambled or changed....

[gjwilson]

Thanks Daddygoose...I`m at work but I`ll try that in the morning and let you know what happens. Gary

[XT]

The screen you see meand the IBM cannot see the HDD... Try Hitting F1 to let it boot from a floppy and do your diag's from there.

[gjwilson]

Well...I tried the F1 button on boot up several times and got several responses. The first try actually booted me right into win95 on the hdd.I thought this was too easy so I shut down and tried again and got a message that there was a bad file and that I couldn`t get into windows..that file being..c:\windows\system\vmn32\bios.vxd....I tried again and got the weird screen again and on the last boot I got a black screen with this number in the upper left hand corner...19990305.Any clue to what might be going on? Gary

[gjwilson]

Oh..there was one other fact...the hdd does have 10 bad clusters on it but the scandisk was supposed to have repaired/relocated those files.Gary