System Disk Error - In need of extreme help please!

[umphlettzoo]

First and foremost I want anyone reading to know I don't know anything about computers. My husband is out to sea on board a submarine somewhere in the atlantic about now...and he is usually the one to fix out computer problems. We have an old Compaq in our sons room that runs on Win 98. We have had problems with this computer for years upon years. I cannot even tell you how many times we have had to reformat this thing. But when we do, it works well again until we try to load some new program. It seems to not like anything that was made for a sytsem later than its Win 98... Anyhow, it was locking up and not working properly so I went to format it. I had done this within the last year so I thought it would be okay to go ahead. The Compaq came with a quickrestore disk that does not work the way its instructions says. Basically we have to wipe c, then d and put in the quick restore disk and voila...perfect working conditions.

My problem is that I was trying to work with out the written instructions because I could not find them. I inserted the boot up floppy and formatted c...i never could get it to register to format d...so i just rebooted... Now no matter what disk i put in it says "invalid system disk"... Even to the boot disk. What can I do? I can't even get back to a c prompt. Is this fixable? I went on the internet and found a site to make another copy of the boot disk but unfortunately our new computer doesn't have a floppy drive. I made it on cd anyway and tried it to no avail.

Is there anyone who can give me any idea of what is wrong and how to fix it? I would really like for this not to be an issue when my husband returns from duty... please help - it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Carla

 

[Nodsu]

Do you have some other bootable CD to test with? Maybe the restore disc has become unusable. You may also have to enable booting from CD-ROM in the BIOS setup.

 

[umphlettzoo]

I have a 3.5 diskette and a cd to boot from and have tried both. i even created another boot cd from the internet on my newer computer. no help. but how would i get to the bios to even change it to boot from a cd. i can't get it to do anything but state that error.....thank you for responding.

 

[IronDuke]

After the memory has been checked you press either Del, F1 or Tab. It will say which on the screen. It is only there for a couple of seconds. You could try pressing Del repeatedly while it tests the memory.

 

[Nodsu]

For Compaqs and HPs it is F2 to get into BIOS setup IIRC. The easiest way to find out is to unplug the keyboard and then start the computer. It will give you an error and tell you what to press to get into setup.

 

[IronDuke]

Thanks Nodsu, I stand corrected and note this.