386 project a success; well, sort of...

[Kendric Beachey]

On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, SFIKE at twa.com wrote:
>After wrestling with my friends old 386 PC for a week trying to get Pygmy
>Linux to install and run on it, I finially got it to run last night, for awhile
>anyway....
>The box came with MSDOS 4.0 on it and I upgraded it to 5.0 from some 5 1/4"
>diskettes he supplied me with. I chose to have DOS shell to boot up as default.
>Then I formatted the hard drive to clear off any junk on there since I wasn't
>getting Pygmy Linux to load up and run during the first go around.
>This seemed to do the trick. I installed Pygmy Linux, the files extracted
>themselves onto the hard drive this time without a hich. (Last time I was
>getting "write errors"). I booted up Pygmy Linx and it was running smoothly
>(and lightning fast too!!). Then I made the mistake of trying out a
>modem terminal program icluded with Pygmy Linux called "minicom". Once I got
>in there, I couldn't figure out how to exit so I had to shut down the machine.
>Now when I boot back up, I get this error: "Non-system disk or disk error,
>replace and press any key when ready". I think the machine is somehow seeing
>Linux on the hard drive as a non system disk.
>To make matters worse, I don't have a DOS boot floppy either. I don't really
>know how to make one either.

To make a bootable DOS floppy, find yourself a working DOS machine, put a
floppy in the drive, and type

format a: /s

(or use b: if that's your situation)  The /s is short for "system".

My advice at this point would be to blow the hard drive back to square one and
start over, assuming you didn't do anything really cool with Pygmy Linux that
you'd like to keep.

-- 
Kendric Beachey
ak at kc.rr.com