gateway booting fr on tim king had the unmitigated gall to say this tk accidentally discovered that if a have a floppy from one particular tk box of diskettets in the a drive when i boot up rather than getting tk the non system diskette message the machine hangs and the cmos tk gets overwritten luckily gateway sends a print of the standard just a wild thought here but how about this there is a small boot program on every formatted diskette whether or not it contains system files it is this small program that prints the non system disk error not dos if this program tries to transfer control to a bios location that is nonstandard on the gateway then it could clear the bios i don t think that the bios is overwritten there is usually a small routine to clear the cmos area in case an invalid configuration prevents the machine from booting i think that the boot code on the fuji disks may inadvertantly call this routine just a thought don t hit me mr moderator i ll go back on topic i swear blue wave qwk v the ozone hole bbs a private bulletin board service full service nodes usrobotics k bps gigs files skydive new orleans rime network mail hub usenet newsgroups please route all questions or inquiries to postmaster ozonehole com
