no operating system

[remerling]

I want to resurrect my old eMachines - the hard drive was bad so I dropped in a "new" one. I can boot from the restore CD to a DOS prompt. Ran FDISK on the 8 gig drive, then performed a format of the drive. No messages about bad sectors. Tried CHKDSK but apparently this is not on the restore CD (which is for Win 98).

Anyhow the restore CD appears to load all of the Win 98 files on the IDE drive but when I try to boot from the drive I get the message "no operating system". I went back to the restore CD and ran SYS C:, which appeared to work ok but the same message appears when I reboot.

The restore CD offers options:
1) restore with format
2) restore without formatting
3) boot from CD-ROM

Have tried 1 and 2, same results. Option 3 brings me to a DOS prompt, which is how I ran fdisk, format, and sys. Any thoughts ? Could there be a problem with the "new" drive ? Any way to check this out ?

[compdoc]

you are getting the no operating system message because there is no operating system on the new drive.

the restore cd is used to fix an existing operating system not to install an operating system

with the help of another computer an imaging software you might be able to clone the bad hard drive to the new hard drive.

if that is not an option or if it does not work you will need to install an operating system on the new hard drive

[remerling]

I also tried installing Win 2000 on the new drive, using a Microsoft install disk and got the same results ("no operating system")... any thoughts ?

[compdoc]

ok so when you put the cd in the cd drive and booted the computer what happened

[benmar]

You can go into BIOS Setup, and see if the BIOS recognizes the hard drive.

When you boot the computer, and the BIOS logo appears, press either the F2
or F10 keys. (The actual key to enter the BIOS is displayed, F2 and F10 seems most
common for me)

[WilliamHenry]

First boot your system from cd/Dvd and install Operating system.