"Invalid system disk"

[mattcaradonna]

OK Folks. I've been glancing at some of these posts and it looks like there are some really smart people here, so I hope you can help me with my problem. Here is the background:
Computer is desktop, no name, pentium 120. HDD is 2 Gig. I was trying to run my scanner SW (paprport) and kept getting a "not enough memory" error message. Tried troubleshooting for that listed in the manual (taking stuff out of start up menu, etc) without fixing it. Then I went to defrag the HDD and got messages saying that there were errors on the HDD which needed to be fixed before it could be defragged. putter sent me to scandisk which i ran. It did not get through a full scan disk (i guess because of probs?). Went to reboot the machine and it goes as far as the intial scrolling of stuff (stuff you see just before the windows screen appears). It stops the boot up with the message: "Invalid system disk. Replace the disk, and then press any key."
I have tried multiple times to reboot but to no avail. There are no disks in the A drive or C drive. I have the Windows 95 CD and put that in the D drive to see if it would boot off that, but it doesn't.

Any suggestions? I throw it out to you computer Gurus! Appreciate any help you might have.

Thanks - Matt Caradonna

[ReddDogg]

What I would do in your shoes is use a boot disk, preferably a windows 98 or windows Me boot disk (I know, not available to public yet, yes i feel priveleged to be running it), and use that boot disk to run scan disk and surface scan on the hard drive. I had to do this for my laptop when I bought it, it came with hard drive containing bad sectors, and the surface scan isolated the 500 megs of space that is in bad sectors, and now the drive works good. I would replace the drive, but those laptop hd's are expensive. Anyway, try scan disk, surface scan, and defrag from boot disk, and if that doesn't fix it you will likely have to reformat the buger unless someone else has an idea that is better.

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Joe Redd
MCP

[DANQU]

Hi Matt Caradonna

On scandisk:
Before running scandisk select the "thorough" radio button which scans the disk surface for errors.
It will take awhile to run but let it. Then you will be able to run defrag