invalid system disk, help

[erichard2002]

Hi, I am working on a friends computer. I dont know too much about it. It is a 166 mhz with 32 megs of RAM. He bought it used and in working condition, about 6 months later, he is getting the error message, invalid system disk, replace and press any key. I dont think the harddrive is bad, it is recognized in the bios. I have bios set to a:, c:, the cdrom. It is saying searching for boot record, ide-0 found, the immediately after that it says the error message. I have tried booting from a floppy also, and that doesnt work either. I am about to go crazy! Please help,

Eric

[YODA74]

might just be that the hdd boot sector is corrupted.
boot from disk/cd and see if the contents of the hdd are still accessible. if yes, try to repair the boot sector by "fdisk_/mbr" without the quotes and replace the _ for a space. or turning on the bootable flag of your partition on using a more capable fdisk prog (like partition magic)
if no, you'll need a fat16/32 recovery util, or just reinstall


------------------
YODA74@windows-sucks.com
CCMR (http://www.dreamwater.net/tech/yoda74/index.html)

[erichard2002]

Thanks for your help, but I cant boot at all. I cant boot from a floppy. Could the floppy drive be corrupt? Whats the best way of checking it to see?

Eric

Originally posted by YODA74:

might just be that the hdd boot sector is corrupted.
boot from disk/cd and see if the contents of the hdd are still accessible. if yes, try to repair the boot sector by "fdisk_/mbr" without the quotes and replace the _ for a space. or turning on the bootable flag of your partition on using a more capable fdisk prog (like partition magic)
if no, you'll need a fat16/32 recovery util, or just reinstall

[ski]

Try the boot floppy in another machine to make sure it's bootable. If not, get or make another one.
If it's ok, then open the computer and make sure all of the floppy drive's connections are secure. If they're ok, then press and hold the Ctrl key(F8 for Win 95) during startup, select Command Prompt, press Enter, at the C:\> prompt type fdisk/status, and press Enter.
If you can see the hard drive's status, then type dir at the C:\> prompt and press Enter. If you can see the hard drive's contents, then it should be ok. Go into BIOS and change the boot sequence so that the hard drive is either checked first or it's the only drive checked. If you can boot up, then it's possible the floppy drive is bad.
If you cannot see the hard drive's status or contents, then check its connections. If they're ok, then it's probably bad.
If the system does not boot up either with a good floppy disk or from the hard drive, then either both are bad or the motherboard is defective.

[mjc]

Also check the boot order in BIOS make sure that the floppy is listed first...and that the drives are set to auto detect.

------------------
mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.