My computer is not detecting the OS, recovery discs not working

I'm really not sure what happened, but when I turn my computer on it goes to a black screen and in white letters it says "Operating system not detected." If I press f8 it growls at me (sounds like it's trying to read something from the floppy drive) and just repeats the line. When I try to run the system with the recovery discs in the CD-drive it takes me to a black screen but shows no text, and the little orange light just stays on. I think I may need to boot from a floppy but I'm unsure how I would go about doing this. Any help would be appreciated.

 

what os do you have?
win 95 and win me cds are not bootable, you need a bootable floppy to boot with those cds.

edit
to boot with a floppy you first need a 3.5" floppy disc and make it bootable.
if you have not done that then you need to find a friend that is running the same OS as you.
if you are running win95 then its going to be difficult to make a boot disc
win98 and ME it is simple.
start menu>control panel
open add remove programs then click the tab 'startup disc'
insert your floppy and click 'create disc'
viola one boot disc

win95 requires knowledge of creating config.sys and autoexec.bat files.
you will also need mscdex on your floppy and load it with the config.sys file
you configure it with the autoexec.bat file
it's been so long since i created a boot floppy for win95 that i have forgotten the particulars

 

dont know what your fault is, but if you want to re-boot and have have a cd handy to boot from you just change the first boot device in bios to cdrom save changes and restart but if you want to boot from a floppy and you need to make a bootable disk you will need to use another machine and 4x1.44mb formatted disks the cd has step by step instructions on how to do this.(win2k)..
hope this helps

 

If I want to make a bootable floppy does it need to be the same OS as mine or can it be different?

 

not really, but it does need the dos drivers for the cd-rom drive.

it would help if you told us what OS you use.