"seabat" wrote in message
...
Howdy:

I've got this old Hewitt Rand 'puter that I'm trying to get running.
It has a 120MHz CPU (unknown make), 16MB RAM, Windows 95 (supposed to
be loaded on drive?). I turn the machine on and it goes through the
POST and then displays all the CPU, hard disk, Plug and Play info and
some stuff about PCI devices.

It then displays this:
External Cache Type : Pipelined BUrst
EDO in DRAM Row(s) : 0

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and then press any key

There is no disk in the drives! I've tried starting it up with a Win95
start-up disk, with Win95 CD in CD-ROM, a combination of the two and I
still get to this point only. I've been into the BIOS (American) and
everything seems kosher there. The floppy lites up and you can hear it
accessing the disk, but that's it! If I could get it to a command
promt I would be very happy. Any ideas?

Thanks.

OK, two possibilities. First, is the CMOS battery dead? If so, you might
have to replace it and then re-detect or re-program the hard drive settings
in BIOS.

Second possibility is that the hard drive was formatted, and boot sequence
is set to hard drive FIRST. In that case, you will get "invalid system
disk". You won't necessarily be able to boot a floppy disk that way. -Dave