Cannot Access Hard Disk After Booting from Floppy Disk

After you start your computer from a floppy disk for troubleshooting purposes or to install an operating system, you may receive the following error message after you attempt to change to the hard disk, even though the hard disk is correctly partitioned and formatted:

This error message can occur if you have a drive overlay program installed and you do not follow the proper procedures to boot from a floppy disk. When a drive overlay program is loaded, you cannot boot directly from a floppy disk if you want to be able to access the hard disk. You must first load the drive overlay program and then boot from the floppy disk.

To resolve this issue, check the documentation included with your drive overlay software, or contact the hard disk manufacturer for information about how to boot from a floppy disk and access the hard disk.

Drive overlay or geometry translation software may be used when a computer does not support Logical Block Addressing (LBA) for gaining access to hard disks over 528 megabytes (MB) in size. Drive overlay software may also be required when a computer's BIOS does not support INT 13 Extensions to gain access to hard disks larger than 8.0 gigabytes (GB) in size.

For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: