" wrote:
I just put together a 686 to transfer dos files from an ailing 486's
hard drives. I was intending to use interlink or laplnk to do this.
For the secons computer I found an old 1 gig (approx) hard drive with
windows 95 on it. I reformated it from a dos 6.2 disk I had and
installed dos 6.2 on it. I then transfered the system from the floppy
to the hard drive. I got a "system transfered" message and assumed
that I now had a bootable hard drive. The problem is that it will not
boot from the hard drive. Command .com now shows to be in C:\ but I
can't seem to figure out what I did wrong. Does anyone have any ideas?

Most likely the drive was used as a second drive and does not have a
master boot record on it.

You can try steps 6 on, but here's the whole thing.

Proper steps to do this:

1. boot DOS floppy. You may want to use a DOS 7 (windows 98) floppy.
2. Use FDISK to delete all the partitions in the extended partition.
3. Use FDISK to delete the extended partition.
4. Use FDISK to delete any remaining partitions.
5. Use FDISK to allocate a DOS partition and make it active.
6, Reboot from floppy.
7. Enter "FDISK /MBR" command. This resets the master boot record.
8, Reboot from floppy.
9. "FORMAT C: /S"
10. Reboot from hard drive.

Whatever you do, DO NOT use the feature of DOS that stuffs programs
into "holes" in memory to give you 640k of executeable program
space. It was a constant source of problems.

If you have a DOS 6.2 instalation floppy set (3 disks), it will
do all of this for you.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/