I'm on a school computer now. Desperately seeking your help.

There were two power outages last night because of some snow we got in my area. My computer is plugged into an APC backup surge protector. Each outage lasted about a minute, which is all I think my backup was good for, so during the second one, the PC went out too. So I said screw it and I turned it all off.

This morning I go to turn the PC on, and during the bootup is says "Cannot load DOS! Anykey to retry". And if you hit a key it tries booting again and gives me the same error.

What do I do? I hope hope hope that something isn't fried, because I have about 30 pages worth of papers to write, 15 of which are due tomorrow!! This sucks!!

DOS!?

Try bootdisk.com

I know! DOS! I'm running Win2K, I didn't think there was a DOS! Now I have to make a Win2K boot disk? Isn't that a long and arduous process?

Just make certain there is no floppy in the drive first. That has happened to me a few times.

ROTFL (sorry..)

Errmm.... I didn't think DOS was supposed to be installed in Win2k either. Perhaps that message is somehow coming from the BIOS and not the OS? (How old is the motherboard?)

bootdisk.com still has links to Win2k boot disks though..

If that is the case, and it is very likely, considering I've been formatting hard drives and installing OSes on my old computer, I will kick myself in the ass and bang my head against the pavement in the street.

If I remember correctly, it takes four floppies. I am just wondering what would give that kind of error, though. Usually, if a file is hosed under W2K, you get a BSOD.

Yeah, it does IIRC, and I'd also expect to see a BSOD. But I think you hit the nail on the head with your previous analysis - floppy already in drive. BIOSes expect to see a DOS system floppy to boot from, so the error message makes sense.

Perhaps the BIOS' CMOS settings got corrupted in some way and possibly a) It's set to just boot from floppy or b) The hard drive type/parameter settings are wrong.

Either way, it might be worth going into the BIOS setup and resetting to defaults and possibly re-detecting the HDD.

No, no, I was merely very very stupid. There was a boot floppy in the drive that I've been using on my other machine. I was in a hurry for a meeting this morning that I woke up late for, and I didn't have time to do any checking at all. I was just in a panic because this would be the WORST possible time for my computer to melt down.

Now I feel incredibly stupid and embarassed.

Grab your Windows 2000 CD, boot off it, and do a repair on the boot sector and associated files. Do NOT select the option to replace all your other files, as this can lead to a mess if you have a service pack installed, and a non slipstreamed Windows 2000 CD.

I will kick myself in the ass and bang my head against the pavement in the street.

Please get a video of yourself doing this and post it.

Like I said, I have done it myself a few times, so I remembered that message. Glad it worked out.

One of the first things I do when I configure a new computer is disable booting from floppy. In the old days, it was just a great way to pick up boot-sector viruses, and these days, nobody uses floppies anyway.

In fact, I was trying to fix one of my PCs last night, and I had to burn a Win98 boot floppy onto CD -- the machine doesn't actually have a floppy disk drive.