formated hard drives

i have two hard drives that have been formated completely. they are blank
i have another computer that i can use but am not aloud to open and connect to the inside wireing other wise i would just copy c: to one of the other hard drives i have.
i would like to know how to copy dos to the other hard drive.
i have tryed making a systems disk but the computer will not take it it says "boot disk failure instert systems disk and hit return"
i have tryed to make differnt types of systems disks and tryed them on both mother boards that i have and they both says the same thing.
i have to use 3.5 1.44 mb disks because i dont have a cd burner



after i have dos on one of the hard drives i want to start copying the hard drive from the one working computer to the blank one.

any help or ideas would be great
thx

Seems to me that since your not even allowed to open the computer then you should'nt be tinkering around with the hard drives, or trying to copy anything.

the computer that i can use is my moms computer and she thinks that if i open it some thing will go wrong with it and she wont be able to use it.
i've tryed telling her that nothing will happen but she wont let me.
if i could i'd take her hard drive out and put it in this other computer that i'm working on it has more mem the mother board she's useing now is an NT station one

What do you want to do? make an exact copy of your mom's box?
get Norton Ghost, this prog allows you to make exact clones of a box.
http://www.symantec.com/techsupp/gho..._tutorial.html
You can use USB, TCP or Parallel to connect, you probably have one of these on both boxes.

You can get images for bootdisks at www.bootdisk.com

this is gonna sound kinda dumb and obvious but when you try booting with the system disc did you go into BIOS and make sure that it was set to boot from floppy? I built the system i am using now and out of the box it was set to boot from hdd only. I had to go into BIOS and tell it to chech floppy first. Just my $.02

If you are wanting to just copy the hard drives then I'd suggest what victorkaum said. Use Norton Ghost, or theres another program call drive image which you can get at www.powerquest.com/driveimage

i'm just trying to get an os on this other computer so i can use it
i did tell the bios to read floppy but for some reason it cant find the floppy
i took the battery out of it and then put it back in and now it cant read the floppy drive
what am i doing wrong?
i've tryed changing just about every bios setting and it still wont read drive a:\

You might want to try restoring defaults in your bios.

when you say that it won't read the a: drive do you mean that the bios will not recognize it or do you mean that if you put a floppy in there that it will not read it.

From what I understand is you have her computer that you want to copy the OS from, and you have a computer that you are working on which you want to copy her OS to.

If thats right then what you should do is find, or borrow a Windows full install disk, or the OS of your choice and install it onto your harddrive from your computer.

It might work if you copied her OS to your computer but there might be problems since her OS already has all of the motherboard drivers, and other device drivers on it.

Since you have removed the battery, it will be necessary to go in to
the BIOS setup and tell it what size floppy you have, and to set the boot
order to boot from the floppy first. Some newer motherboards will automatically
detect hardware, but you can't always count on it.

If you still can't boot from the floppy disk after setting the BIOS, consider the
possibility that you have a bad floppy disk. Try several disks before giving up.
You may have a bad floppy drive. Floppy drives are notoriously unreliable.

You could have a disk made on one computer that can't be read by another
because of wear on one or the other.

If your cdrom drive is bootable, get a bootable cd, and that will solve your
problem.
:cool:

wait a miniute. One thing here. Thats illegal if you are trying to do that with a microsoft product. You are trying to copy windows from on hdd to another for use in a difrent system. that is against the end user liscense agreement.