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View Full Version : Invalid System Disk? What?


357mag
10-30-2004, 05:27 AM
I have a problem. A while ago I had a new motherboard and processor installed and shortly after I reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Win 2000 with no problem. What my procedure is is to format my C drive using Partition Magic and then restart the computer and then hit the space bar to boot off the CD-ROM and simply follow the setup program for Windows. This procedure has never given me any problems in the past. But a few nights ago after Partition Magic did it's thing and the computer restarted it brought up this:

Invalid System Disk
Remove the disk and then press any key

I pressed the space bar and was able to continue and follow the Win 2000 setup program. When I reached the end and the part of the program that asks you to restart your computer I got:

Invalid System Disk
Remove the disk and then press any key

Again I just pressed the space bar and was able to continue. Then I started loading my programs and when I had to restart my machine I got the same message:

Invalid System Disk
Remove the disk and then press any key

So I brought my computer back to the local shop and Roger the tech said it was because there was a zip disk in my zip drive and my computer was trying to boot off it. He went into the bios setup and into boot priority and set it up so the computer boots off the hard drive first and the DVD drive second and not at all from the zip drive. Well I brought it home and tried to install some programs and again after restarting I got:

Invalid System Disk
Remove the disk and then press any key

So I brought it back to Roger and this time he went into the bios and set it so my computer only boots from the hard drive. Well I didn't really like it set up that way cuz when the time comes for me to reformat and reinstall Win 2000 my computer won't boot from the CD-ROM will it? So I tried this. I went into the bios and hit the F key that corresponds with "Restore Defaults". I then inserted the Win 98 boot disk and at the A prompt typed format C/S. Now I have used the format command in fdisk before and it does not take that long to format a drive. This time it took 5 hours to complete! 5 hours! And then when I restarted my computer my computer booted into Windows and to my desktop! In other words the format did not work! I just wasted 5 hours! What went wrong? At this point I don't know what to do. Can someone help me get rid of this message? Why am I getting this message in the first place when I never had it before?

Paul Komski
10-30-2004, 06:14 AM
When the PC was set to only boot from the HDD were things OK but then started to give problems again after you decided to "Restore Defaults". This is to clarify that the HDD itself is OK. You might want to run the manufacturer's diagnostics on the HDD in any case.

What other drives are on the PC? Floppies, CDs, ZIPs?

Rather than using PM or fdisk and format you could just clear the drive's boot sectors with a utility such as WipeOut from http://www.lurkhere.com/~nicefiles/index.html , which you would add to your boot floppy and then run wipeout /p /q from command prompt. Then boot from the Win2K CD and let it do all the partitioning itself.

pip22
11-09-2004, 05:07 AM
When the format didn't work, were you by any chance trying to format an NTFS partition with a DOS utility (FDISK)