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Trying to save a old dos system that runs a mill in my father-in-laws shop. Vendor wants a ton of money to come in to fix the system.

Bought new hard drive partitioned it with partition magic 7.0. created a primary partition. FAT format.

I am able to boot from the old drive, but when you enter into the program to run the mill the drive fails.

I formatted the d: drive with a format d: /s command. All seemed to work. copied in all of the dos directory, the wina20.386 file, the config.sys and autoexec.bat.

I then unplugged the old drive, removed it from the bios, switch the jumper on the drive to be single / master and when the system boots its says " PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT" like it can't see the primary partition.

Any help would be most helpful! I can't remember what I am missing to get this thing to boot!

John

Hmm I don't know how much I can help, but was a boot sector built upon the primary partition?

Assuming it's a PATA IDE interface since it's old, if it's a drive detection problem try different jumper settings, like CS/cable select (and make sure the drive is connected to the very end of the cable).

Computers need to:
1. Recognize the drive. (chiefly BIOS, but POST should show it)
2. Find a primary partition. (Start of boot routine.)
3. Find boot information.
4. Load data based on the boot information.