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"Invalid system disk" -- but -- THERE'S NO DISK IN THERE!!!

F

Felecha

Golden Member
Finally got the installation of 98se to get going (see my other post today, if you're curious -- "Is 98SE limited by the 2GB boot boundary?")

After Phase 1 -- copying files, it said it would reboot, which is of course normal, and when it blanked out and came up for air, it gave me the "invalid system disk" thing. But there's nothing in the floppy. It SHOULD have a disk in the CD, of course -- the 98CD!! Even when I take out the CD and strike the any key, it says invalid system disk!!! I've never seen that, in my career of maybe 25 or 30 Windows installs. Any clue?? I's absolutely dead in the water. I started over, ran through the files copy again, and again the same thing.
 
invalid system disk.. that means it cannot find a disk to boot off of... including your hard drive.


it sound slike your Win98 install screwed with your bootmagic, and bootmagic cant start.... not sure though, hard to diagnose without seeing it... you might try booting off a disk and seeing whats on the drive
 
when you formatted your disk, did you format the primary partition with format C:/s as it sounds like you missing your system files & the system is trying to boot from your hdd. if you omitted that step, boot up with a win98 startup floppy & type sys C: & hit enter. take the floppy out & reboot!
 
But it got all the way through phase 1 of installation from the CD. I chose US English, Custom installation, keyboard, all that stuff. It was coming around for phase 2, how could it not have already made itself bootable by that point? It's a second partition, created primary, formatted to FAT32, set active with Partition Magic, booted to the CD Setup.exe, etc, just like normal, up to the point of the "invalid disk". As I write, it's going back through a repeat of the partitioning.

A wild thought -- the first, original partition is HP's factory version of 98se. Is it possible that this machine is not going to like having an OEM 98se put on, even with a clean partitioning and formatting job?
 
Also, I did have to get back into BootMagic with the BootMagic floppy, which started right out with "Starting Windows 98 ... "
 
Don't use Partition Magic. Get it off your disc and then repartition using a win98 boot disc. Then install Win98. You can use BootMagic after that if you want to install other OS's. Just my opinion, but I've had a lot of similar problems with Partition Magic.
 
Well, after one more partitioning job, I did the 98 CD and when the option came to either

run setup from CD (which I had been choosing)
start 98 with CD ROM support
start 98 without CD ROM support

I chose to start with CD ROM support, and it accepted that and went right into the correct installation routine, all the way to the end. I don't remember it working that way, but hey, working is good.

Thanks, all, that's it for today.
 
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