When your battery went dead, all the settings in the cmos memory ("BIOS") went bad, as you said, including the setting for the boot 
disk order.  You need to go into the cmos settings, probably by pressing "del" during the hardware boot, and go to the section on 
the drive boot order and make sure that your main hard drive is on the list, preferably in first place.

Unfortunately, this is no guarantee that all will work well, but on an older machine it is likely that will do the trick.

Dean Kukral


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "SUBSCRIBE PCBUILD Brian Fraser" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2008 10:43 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] 386 boot up error


I have a 386 and the internal battery went flat and it lost all its settings.  After replacing the battery I can now not boot the 
machine.  I keep on getting the message "Diskette error Press any key".
Any ideas would be appreciated.

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