Please Help

[dexer]

I hope this is the right forum for this.
I have an old acer 486 that won't boot up in any type of mode including dos. It has sat for a couple of years and needs a new cmos battery. I decided I would reformat the hard drive before replacing the battery. I was told to use the fdisk command and everything got messed up from there. I tried doing options 2 and 3 for partition the hard drive but it would only let me do the first option. Then it told the volumn label was corrupt. I went to microsoft web site and followed the information there.
"Some versions of MS-DOS require you to enter the volume label when formatting a hard drive or deleting an MS-DOS drive using the FDISK command. However, if the volume label is corrupted or was changed by a third-party utility to contain lowercase letters, this is impossible.

To correct this problem, you can use the LABEL command to delete the volume label, then use FORMAT or FDISK. When you are prompted for the volume label, press ENTER (which indicates no volume label).

If LABEL doesn't successfully delete the volume label, you can use the following debug script to erase the first sector of the drive and make it appear unformatted. FORMAT and FDISK can then be used."Now all I can get to show on the monitor is Bedrock VT Dual Cas Edo Bios 2.130. If I try to use a boot disk I get the error message about the disk being in the drive. I have tried to boot into safe mode and also have tried to boot into Dos. Nothing is working for me.

[glc]

1. Replace the battery.
2. Install the drive in another machine, download the utility software from the hard drive manufacturer's site, and zero fill the drive. Depending on the manufacturer, the same utility software may also be able to partition and format the drive for you.

[dexer]

I don't know how to take the hard drive out and put it in this computer. But I tried something different and am now able to get into bios and don't know if this helps. The way I got into bios was to unplugged the computer while it was on. Also I am going to try and get a battery today. One of our main computer stores here tried to tell me there was no battery in computers. Obviously I won't be going back there again.

[dexer]

I just wanted to let you know that I unplugged the computer while it was on and then plugged it back in and the bios came up, I don't know if this is of any help. Sure hope so since I don't know how to put the hard drive into this computer.
I am going to try and get a battery today and see if I can find the old software for this computer.
I really appreciate the help here.
Thanks and I will let you know what happens when I put the battery in.

D

[dexer]

I put the new battery in and when I started up the computer the bios options came up. I clicked on load defaults and restarted the computer and when the computer rebooted I got the blank screen again. I tried to get back into bios and had to take the battery out and put back in and it once again brought up the bios.
Is there a way to get into dos from the bios?

[glc]

Is there a way to get into dos from the bios?

Nope, but will it boot to a floppy bootdisk? If so, you can use Fdisk and Format to redo the hard drive to reinstall an operating system. If you already messed with Fdisk, there's no DOS on the hard drive any more.

[dexer]

It won't boot from a floppy. Can I download DOS disk and use it? I have seen some DOS downloads and am unsure which one I should download to use if one would work.

[glc]

If it won't boot from a bootable floppy, no download in the world is going to help you, you have a hardware issue. This is going back to old-time basics. Yes, you can download a DOS boot floppy image to make one if you don't have a bootable floppy disk.

www.bootdisk.com