k, so i'm putting together my old p75mhz and less old pII450mhz into a new pc.

So, i get everything hooked up; IDE cables of the HD/cdrom/disk drive in place etc.; but when i boot i get a "162-system options not set" message.

I've been doing a little search for this on the web and some ppl adviced others with the same prob to go into BIOS and set it to default settings. I tried that one, didn't work.

Now; for the record: i SUCK at them slave/master settings so i'll give an overview of how they're connected to the mobo:

->HD: alone on IDE cable, set to master
->cdrom: alone on an IDE cable, set to slave

could this piece of amateur work be the cause? Or should i go and mess around with the BIOS settings after all?

If they're alone on their IDE cable, they should be set as master.

IF there are two devices on an IDE cable, one must be set as master, one must be set as slave.

So, you did it wrong. I don't think that should stop your computer from booting, though. Still, it's worth a try.

If you keep having issues after fixing that, post back and I might try looking into your error a bit more.

Sorry, remind me ox. Why are yuo doing this again?

to play dosgames, my spamming friend.


anyways, so i set the jumper on the cdrom to "master", and it still didn't work out, still "system options not set" bull.

Then, i decided to it the "regular" way, put the HD and cdrom on one IDE cable with HD master and cdrom slave, but wouldn't work either. So, i plugged out the disk drive and tried it that way. Surprisingly, the windows that was already on it loaded. So, i figured "why the fuck do i need a diskdrive anyways", and rebooted with win98 install disk, chose "boot from win98 disk" at startup, BUT pc froze when i did that.

So, i just laoded windows, and tried running the new 98 install from in windows itself. BUT, i only had an a: and c: drive, with the a: drive having a disk drive icon. I click on the "disk" drive, and the cdrom reads from the disk and i can see explorer listing the contents of the win 98 install disk, just about halfway, then it froze. (windows)

Apparently, for some bizzaro reason, my pc thinks my cdrom is a disk drive. Don't know wtf i'm doing wrong here. When i go into BIOS my disk drives are disabled, and the BIOS apparently KNOWS there's a cdrom, cos i get the option to do a primary and/or secondary boot on cdrom and HD. weird shit.

I reckon that the "boot from win98 disk" doesn't work cos the pc in some way recognizes it as a disk drive (kinda like it did inside windows)


Anyway; i did a format of the HD by now, so can't boot into windows anymore. It seems to me that something is screwed up. Now i re-plugged the disk drive in, but it still won't boot from the win98 cd. But i don't get the "system options not set" message anymore either.

why are you loading win98 if you're trying to play DOS games? Why not just load DOS?

Does your floppy drive work? You could find a dos install disk online somewhere and just boot off that, install dos on your HD, and go like that.

You are definetely having some weird issues. I'll give it more thought when I have time.

It seems to work, but in a very freaky manner (with the cdrom and stuff). I'll give it a go sometime.

hmmm...have you tried booting in with a win98 boot disk? Make sure fdisk and format are on it.

Boot up and fdisk to kill any active partitions and recreate them. Reboot again off the floppy and format it.

Then tranfer your system files with a sys c: command. At that point, if I remember correctly, your hard drive should be able to boot itself.

Then just load your old dos games via floppy.

Mm, there's an idea, will try that.


But i think it's still mighty weird that the pc recognizes there's a cdrom (i wouldn't get the option for it at boot if it didn't); but apparently considers it a freaky sort of monster-disk drive. And thus won't start up. I've tried a few settings now;

->on one cable: HD master and cdrom slave, disk drive apart
->two cables: HD and cdrom master, disk drive apart
->one cable: cdrom master and HD slave (lol), disk drive apart

And none of them bastards made a difference.

I'll try and get the boot disk idea working tho. Tnx for the help, in any case. In the meantime i found a solution to my problems; a mate of mine is willing to donate his old pc to me, w00tz. But if i can make this work i can do dos games over LAN. lol.

lol...you don't wanna screw with networking in DOS. It's a freakin' pain in the ass.

I'm thinking your CD-ROM might be bad or something. That's all I can really think of. Have you tried clearing your bios by resetting the jumper?

The jumpers on the cdrom are all definetely correct, yes?

btw, LOL at the cdrom master, HD slave thing. hahah

honestly have no idea why i even look in this forum, it's all gibberish to me...

It's true, i always read stuff here too, and i think the number of times i understood what the hell they were talking about can be count on one hand.