I need help quick!

[pcmark]

My wifes computer is broke,and she needs to use it for work. When it boots up,I get an invalid system disk error.(There is no floppy in the drive)I noticed in the bios that it was listing her hard drive as 4bg, I recently upgraded it to a 10gb. I cheated and copied the old drive to the new with Maxtor Max Blast. I thought that's weird,so I changed the drive to Auto in the bios and had the bios Auto detect it. It comes up as 10gb's. So I save the changes and reboot. Invalid system disk error still, and it reports it as 4gb. It's not accepting my changes. Could it be the cmos battery? I tried fdisk/mbr,no good. I can get with a floppy and see the contents of the drive. I'm thinking it's just because it's seeing it as 4gb. What now?

 

[Damaged]

Try copying the system files from the boot disk to the hard drive. Boot with the floppy the at the command prompt type sys c:.

Might work, might not.

 

[pcmark]

I did that, it worked😀 Funny thing is the bios screen shows 4bg's and windows shows 10gb's. At least it boots up. Scandisk found some errors,which I've fixed. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

 

[Damaged]

It's a step in the right direction at least.

Just don't ask me why you lost those files though.

 

[pcmark]

UPDATE- it appears her system is hosed. Time for a format and reinstall. Hopfully I can recover her important files. I got the thing to boot up into Windows,but it gives me error messages or blue screens constantly. Outlook wouldn't work,IE would crash,scandisk would find crosslinked files,etc. I did a reinstall of Windows over the old one,things are still screwed. I tried running a surface scan of the hard drive,it's less than a month old:bad sectors. Scandisk would crash before I could get all the way through. Since I've got to do it over,I'm going to put Win2000 on there😀