Help with Second Hand PCs

A company donated Compaq PCs to my organization. We setup the PCs to use, however, we are getting a message as if a disk is in the drive during bootup. There is no disk in the drive, but the computer asks for the non-system disk to be removed and then press any key. We cannot get beyond this message. Any ideas?

The problem is most likely that the hard drives on the computers have been wiped completely clean - without even the files necessary to boot the computer. About six months ago I fixed up about 15 donated compaq Deskpro 486 and Pentium computers - they gave the same message you are getting.<:LINEBREAK:><:LINEBREAK:>It can be a fairly involved process to get them up and running with windows. In my case, some of the computers had CD-ROM drives, and I had a copy of Windows 98 on CD, so I created a Windows 98 boot disk with CD-ROM support from a computer that already had Windows 98 installed on it (My Computer - Control Panel - Add/Remove Programs - Startup Disk) , and used this boot disk to get a prompt for the compaq. If it works correctly, you should be able to put in your Windows 98 CD-ROM, and type "d:" at the prompt to get to your Windows 98 CD, and then type "setup.exe" to run the Windows 98 installation.<:LINEBREAK:><:LINEBREAK:>In many cases, the boot disk will have a CD_ROM driver that may not work with the CD-ROMs on your machine. You then need to find out the make and model of your CD_ROM drive and get the necessary DOS drivers from the manufacturers website and install them separately on the compaqs, then proceed with the Windows 98 boot disk ...<:LINEBREAK:><:LINEBREAK:>If your up to the technical challenge, you can find some good how-to's and discussions to help you at HardwareCentral.com. A volunteer/mentor is another option if you decide you want help configuring the computers - check out CompuMentor's Mentor Matching program.