I recently purchased a lap top with no o/s, hdd,caddy,battery,floppy and cd rom, all of which I bought and installed.
The DOS appears not to exist, the BIOS is ok. but I don't be able to install any O/S. Any suggestions please, no rudes one, I have already accepted those.

Bill

You will need a Startup Disk for Win95,98,Me. This is a Fat 32 OS. The Hard Drive has to be Partittioned and formatted for these OS`s. This can be done using Fdisk on the Disk. Follow the instructions. If NT and Win2000 are to be installed this is a Fat 16 OS and a Boot Disk is required before you can install the OS. Agian the drive needs to be partitioned and formatted for a Fat 16 OS before the Os is installed!
Thanks

Go to Staples or CompUSA and buy Partiton Commander 10. The CD in the pkg is self-bootable, and the extensive documentation explains file types and allows formatting of drives for whatever you need. (Partion Magic might also work, but I've not used it) I hope that helps.