My guess is that the hard drives have been wiped clean and you get the message
because there is no operating system installed. If the drives are not
partitioned, then a DOS or Windows bootable floppy will not see a C: drive
partition.

You need to start from scratch, partition and format the drives and install an
operating system... Ben Myers

On Sun, 7 Oct 2007 11:48:59 +0200, "Xavier M." wrote:

Hi,

I work for a non profit association and we were given two Compaq PC's by a
company: one PIII 450MHz Deskpro, and one PIII 866MHz Deskpro EN (with no
documentation nor software on floppy/CD ROM). I have no idea of what is
installed on their disks.

Both PC refuse to boot from the hard drive with the same message: "non
system disk or disk error"

I 've checked the Compaq Setup with F10, everything seems OK (including HDD
setup)

I tried booting from DOS or Windows XP floppy disks and then strangely, I
can't see any C: hard disk from there...

Help !!! What am I supposed to do?

TIA!

Xavier