My older Toshiba 480CDT laptop won't boot up to Windows 98.

[Tony0327]

Every time I try to boot it up, I get the "Non-system disk" error message, although there is no floppy drive installed on the laptop. I'm pretty sure that message is caused by me missing the io.sys file on the hard drive. Can that message be caused by anything else? Anyway, I had erased the contents of the entire hard drive before since apparently, Windows 98 had become so corrupted that I couldn't do anything to try to repair it... Before wiping out the hard drive, I couldn't boot it up at all normally, nor into safe mode, and for some reason unknown to me, the computer lacked vital utilities such as regedit and scandisk. So, is there any way that my dead laptop, with an apparently nonfunctional CD-ROM drive (I couldn't boot from any OS CD), no floppy drive, and no io.sys file on the hard drive, can be revived? Please, I would greatly appreciate some help, for I've been trying unsuccessfully for several weeks now to get my laptop up and running again. I hope someone here can offer me a solution to my problem. Thanks for your time, everyone.

~Tony

 

[Super_Nova]

Well you have some options but they aren't free. If the CD ROM is broken that rules out installing from a CD. No floppy drive rules that out too. If you have a desktop you can buy a desktop hard drive adapter to connect a 2.5 inch hard drive to your desktop and format it there then copy the windows 98 cd to it and install from there. That or you could replace the CD ROM. Where abouts are you posting from?

 

[Praetor]

I get the "Non-system disk" error message, although there is no floppy drive installed on the laptop

Translation: boot info is toasted from the drive

As for booting, you can always use a network/USB boot