system startup
 

Hi
My husband purchased a refurbished Dell for a friend's child. It came with a start up disk but the computer is not reading it, and has a prompt on the screen C:\>. We don't know what to type in to get it started, win.exe didn't work and there are no directions. Can anyone help??

Welcome to SysChat,
Try booting it without the startup disk, if you arrive at the same screen, then try typing:
dir /p
this will show the listing of the harddrive (seperated one page at a time), if there is a folder called windows and a folder called program files, Windows likely is on the system and you should be able to type win to boot into it.
Start up disks are usually nothing more than a condensed version of dos, thus when you boot the computer with it in the drive, you arrive at the dos prompt C:\>, unfortunayly this prompt will not always allow for use of an OS on the drive.
If nothing is displayed without the boot disk then there is no good OS or no bootable OS on the drive, and you will need to install one. Good Luck.

Is the start up disk a floppy or a cd/dvd?

When you say it is not reading it, do you mean that it is just dumping you to the dos prompt or something else? When you boot without the startup disk does it do the same thing?

sorry, bad wording on my part.
the start up disc would likely be a floppy and it would force a DOS prompt as the comp would boot from it.
When you boot the computer without a floppy or cd in any drive is it still a DOS prompt that is displayed? If so type win
if that does not fix it, either windows is not on the drive OR it is corrupted and you will have to re-install.