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Okay, so I'm trying to fix a friend's computer but so far I haven't had any luck. It's an older Dell. Pentium 966 Mhz with 256 MB of PC133 RAM.

Basically, it won't let me start windows. I get the error message "Invalid boot disk. Insert boot disk into drive A:"

There's no disk in drive A. I thought maybe was a bad drive so I disconnected it. I changed the boot order to CD first. No dice. I've re-installed windows and formatted the hard drive. Works fine till I restart the computer. Then it's the same problem. I thought maybe it was a bad hard drive. I switched it out. Still the same problem. I've tried other versions of windows. Same problem.

In any case, I'm stumped. Any help at all would be great.

Hi there Iron,Whats the current configuration of your drives. When the PC startsup, it scans drives for the OS(operating system), when there is none, you get that message.

I'm not sure what you mean by configuration. There's only one hard drive hooked up and it's set to (I think) cable select. I've had it set to primary master as well, but the effect is the same. I know there's an OS on it, since I just installed it again. I've no idea why it's not detecting it.

hey iron pigeon
what predator means is how are your drives set up to boot here are a couple of examples

c,cd-rom,floppy
cd-rom,c,floppy
ect..

looking forward to your reply
genie3251

I believe it's cd rom, hard drive, floppy.

Is the HD also connected to the master position (the end of the cable) on the IDE cable?

You could try replacing the motherboards battery , it might be dead.

Okay, I checked the cable and it's fine. I also replaced the battery, but still getting the same problem. Coincidentally though, I found out that if I leave the windows disc in the drive, it'll start up fine. If I try to start it up again without the disc, the error returns.