Re: old XyWrite archive.

[flash flash@xxxxxxxx]

Michael,

pcs have a battery on the motherboard which maintains the BIOS settings
which control such things as boot sequence and hardware component
recognition. These batteries fail with age, and when a pc has been
disconnected from the mains for a long time, the BIOS settings may be
lost, causing the pc to fail to boot correctly, or to fail to recognize
some of its hardware components. If this is the case, you may have to
boot to the BIOS set-up program (often F1 or F2, on a few machines F12)
and manually restore the appropriate settings (assuming you know or knew
what they were) before attempting to boot the operating system.

Thereafter, if you can get it to boot at least to DOS, you can use
DOS-level tools to scan for disk sector errors and try to retrieve data.
Could be very tedious. Good luck.

Flash