Hi everyone. Need your expert help urgently. My flatmate decided to reformat the hard drive on his laptop as he bought it 2nd hand a while ago and it was full of rubbish, so decided to start afresh. Its an IBM Thinkpad with 32Mb RAM and 2Gb Hard drive and was running win 95. The reformat went as planned and reverted back to the MS-Dos C: propmt. When he tried to run his CD-Rom drive it wouldnt run (presumably becuase of the reformat wipeing the drivers or something?). Though after restarting he is faced with an even bigger error, the Dos prompt doesnt load and he is just faced with an error message saying "Invalid System Disk""replace the disk, and then press any key"! Nothing will happen except this message. He knows nothing about computers and i dont know that much. Urgent help/remedies/suggestions would be very much appreciated.
If we can get the Dos prompt to load,how can we get the CD-Drive to load (we backed up all driver '.drv' files we could find and have them on 3.5floppy)!
PS-Is this machine good enough to run win98 SE if we ever get it working again.
Thank you very much.
AMD XP 2600 Abit NF7-S mobo 512mb Corsair 3500 Ram ATI Radeon 9550 Soundblaster Audigy 2 Maxtor Diamondice 120Gb HDD Samsung 80Gb HDD XP Pro 550w PSU Belkin Wireless Network
Don't worry, that is perfectly normal. What you need now is a Windows 98 boot disk. You can make one by going to a computer with Windows 98 on it and then goto Start Settings / Control Panel / double click the Add Remove programs icon / click the Startup Disk and create disk. If you have a Windows 98 license but don't have access to a computer with 98 on it then goto http://www.bootdisk.com
It just sounds like he didn't sys the drive when he formated When at the a: prompt you would type so it looks like: A:\>format c: /s --------the /s switch copies the system files making the drive bootable Then you'll be able to get to the c: prompt. There can be reasons to sys the drive. It's not really necessary to sys when formating, installing windows also installs the system files making the drive bootable. The win98 bootdisk has cd drive support.
#4. "RE: Invalid System Disk" In response to JP (Reply # 3)
thanks for your responses. I have a possibly more tricky question now. I managed to create a win 98 startup disk on 3.5" and inserted it when starting and true enough the system loaded to the dos prompt of a: and i could switch to c:. The problem now is that the laptop in question is a few years old now, and has an interchangeable 3.5 drive and a CD-Rom drive. So when i load my startup disk it tries installing the drivers for the CD-Rom, obviously cant find the CD-Rom (since its not attached) and so aborts the driver installation so when i change my 3.5 to my CD-Rom to run my win 98 installation disk it doesnt recognise the CD-Rom!!! Any ideas on this one? I thought about loading to the DOS prompt, copying my startup disk to c:, then restarting with my CD drive in with the hope that it would boot to the dos prompt from c: and install my cd drivers. However, i tried this but cant get it to work! Does anyone know if this technique would work? If so how can i get it to work? Any other suggestions? Would the comp recognise an external CD-Rom attached through the parallel port?(i can get hold of one from a friend)?, or is their a simpler and quicker method?
Sorry for the long message but im (well my flatmate) is depserate for a solution. Thanks people
AMD XP 2600 Abit NF7-S mobo 512mb Corsair 3500 Ram ATI Radeon 9550 Soundblaster Audigy 2 Maxtor Diamondice 120Gb HDD Samsung 80Gb HDD XP Pro 550w PSU Belkin Wireless Network
sys the drive. figure out what driver is for your cd drive. copy it to the harddrive. copy mscdex.exe to the harddrive. create an autoexec.bat file with statements pointing to mscdex and to the cd driver on the harddrive. copy it to the harddrive. boot up with out the boot floppy the .bat file will load the drivers for the cd drive.
It sounds like your idea might work, I was thinking the same thing! Any idea if the drive bay is hot-swappable? If it is, then I suspect that capability is handled by the BIOS and you should be OK. Boot up off the floppy, swap out the drives and install Windows. You'll have to forgo making the floppy disks when the installation asks you too. It shouldn't hurt the computer at all to try it.