🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 07 May 1999 12:48:44 GMT, budgie <budgie@NOWHERE.cantech.net.au>
wrote:

>The strangest thing has just happened to my kids' '486 ......
>
>Boot priority is set to A; C: and when a non-bootable floppy is left
>in at bootup, the error message "Drive not ready or non-system disk"
>etc etc appears in FRENCH.  This is new!  While I understand enough
>French to get by on, I'd like it back in English.

If you're seeing the "Non System disk or disk error" message, you should be
aware that this message isn't actually part of the BIOS.  It's stored on the
first sector of the floppy concerned.  You see, "non-bootable" MS-DOS disks
aren't actually non-bootable.  They are bootable -- they have a tiny boot
sector program that displays the "Non-system disk or disk error" message,
and then asks you to "press any key to continue." This is how boot sector
viruses spread; they insert themselves into a floppy's boot sector, and the
next time the "Non-system disk or disk error" message is displayed, the
virus has inserted itself in memory or your computer's hard drive.

So if you're seeing the "Non System disk or disk error" message in French,
your floppy was probably formatted with a french-language version of
Windows.  If, on the other hand, you see the "drive not ready" error, that
*is* part of the BIOS and your BIOS is corrupted somehow.

-- 
Jason Stokes: jstok@bluedog.apana.org.au

 "Any idiot can learn to program computers, and, alas, many do."