I have two very old computers.  One is a desktop-- an HP Pavilion, running on windows 98.  I have the internet on the desktop, and I mainly use this one (the desktop).  But earlier this year I got a laptop from a thrift store.  It's really old.  It's a Compaq Lte 5250.  It has no CD rom drive, and is running on what seems to be an older version of windows 98.  It has no internet connection, but I made use of it by typing up poems and stories and just random things.  Some important some not.

One day, I was getting ready to save all my poems that I had typed up (but had not written on paper) on to a diskette.  Well, somehow my laptop froze up!  So, I decided to press alt ctrl DELETE.  My laptop has a weird Fn key that's in blue letters.  When you press it, it activates other blue keys on the keyboard (ex- the letter U.  When you press FN and Type 'u' you get the number four) so I'm thining maybe I pressed FN ctrl delete (wich is sysrq).  Well, whatever.  I don't know how it happend, but whenever I turn on my laptop now, all I get is a BLACK screen and grey letters that say 'insert boot disk in sysetem-- install boot disk and restart.'

There was no way of getting past that screen, so I made a disk on this machine (my desktop).  I wasn't sure if it WOULD work since it's a different company and all but hey-- windows is windows.  So, I made the boot disk and tried again.  I got past that screen finally but I can't get to my desktop.  I know this is really STUPID, but I'm only thirteen years old, and really want to get back my files.  Even if there's a way I can do it that looses my files, I'm fine with that.  I just need a second computer.  

Any help would be grand.

Remember:
-It's a windows 98
-It has NO CD rom Drive.
-I'm only 13, and I'm a little slow.  

Thanks so much!Just looking around the internet the Compaq Fn key is a F-unctio-n key that works in conjunction with F keys and some others.

Now that you have a '98 bootdisk, if you get to the choice screen and chose Minimal boot you get to the A:\> prompt where you can type: dir /p , to see if there are any dir-ectories on the drive and press the spacebar to see the next screenful.

So, I don't know what you did but the first thig you could try is to restore a PREVIOUS registry:

Type: A:\>scanreg /restore , highlight a date/time before the incident and click OK.AAAH!  The boot disk doesn't work anymore!  And I ran out of blank disks!   what does holding down the f5 key on boot up do?