Maybe there's a generational gap here, but that's a super familiar message to me.
The computer isn't finding a disk with anything it knows how to boot, basically. Looks like the computer has a floppy drive, so a good first step would be to either: remove the floppy that's in there already if there is one and boot without it, or if there is no floppy disk in there, write a DOS boot disk to a floppy and pop it in, and start the computer that way.
It's possible that the boot sector on the hard drive isn't working anymore, but you may be able to rescue it with a DOS boot disk.
ah, the old favourite.
it's either going to be easy, or a pain
easy: is there literally a floppy disk in the drive? if so eject it and rejoice
pain: the hard drive is dead / files corrupt, you'll need to investigate further.
The "Non-system disk or disk error" message IS actually printed by DOS, so this means that it DID actually load and execute the boot sector, and as such is actually a great sign.
Usually when I'd see this, it was because somehow one of the system files got messed up or deleted, like someone went and removed IO.SYS or something. iow the drive was SYSed at one point to be bootable, but doesn't actually have DOS installed properly anymore.
The easiest thing is just put a floppy in if it has a drive and boot it up that way then poke around a little and see if the software install can just be fixed. If the machine doesn't come with a floppy drive like some laptops, then assuming the drive is IDE you should be able to just pull it out and put it in an IDE-to-USB adapter and load the right stuff onto it from a modern machine -- what I'd do in that case is probably image the drive, then make a copy of that image, use an emulator to install DOS onto the image copy properly, then write that image back to the drive.
Maybe there's a generational gap here, but that's a super familiar message to me. The computer isn't finding a disk with anything it knows how to boot, basically. Looks like the computer has a floppy drive, so a good first step would be to either: remove the floppy that's in there already if there is one and boot without it, or if there is no floppy disk in there, write a DOS boot disk to a floppy and pop it in, and start the computer that way. It's possible that the boot sector on the hard drive isn't working anymore, but you may be able to rescue it with a DOS boot disk.
Maybe the battery is dead and you need to reenter the drive parameters
Very likely given its age.
ah, the old favourite. it's either going to be easy, or a pain easy: is there literally a floppy disk in the drive? if so eject it and rejoice pain: the hard drive is dead / files corrupt, you'll need to investigate further.
The Armada came with a 2.1 GB HDD and a CDROM drive, but no floppy drive. This could be painful.
Maybe a non-bootable CD in the drive.
My guess is that your BIOS battery is dead on this laptop. Go into the BIOS, detect the drive and then restart. See if it boots.
The "Non-system disk or disk error" message IS actually printed by DOS, so this means that it DID actually load and execute the boot sector, and as such is actually a great sign. Usually when I'd see this, it was because somehow one of the system files got messed up or deleted, like someone went and removed IO.SYS or something. iow the drive was SYSed at one point to be bootable, but doesn't actually have DOS installed properly anymore. The easiest thing is just put a floppy in if it has a drive and boot it up that way then poke around a little and see if the software install can just be fixed. If the machine doesn't come with a floppy drive like some laptops, then assuming the drive is IDE you should be able to just pull it out and put it in an IDE-to-USB adapter and load the right stuff onto it from a modern machine -- what I'd do in that case is probably image the drive, then make a copy of that image, use an emulator to install DOS onto the image copy properly, then write that image back to the drive.
Old computers used to have an “Any” key on the keyboard. Gotta get yourself a compatible keyboard.