Invalid system disk, replace the disk and then press any key

[Muse]

Yesterday, I scheduled a recording with my TV card to a HD (FAT32) I'd recently reformatted and came back to find a message saying there was insufficient HD space. This surprised me since the HD is 40 GB and was practically empty. This is the 4th HD in the system. I discover that Windows 2000 thinks the drive is not formatted! I start reformatting it and after most of the reformat is complete I get message that Windows cannot complete the format. I try again and it fails again. I boot to a Windows 98 boot floppy and run fdisk and delete the one and only partition, a Primary DOS partition. I create a new one and expect I'll have to reformat. I boot to Windows, which doesn't see the drive, however Partition Magic 7.0 does see it, so I format it in there (it was an instant process!). Well, Windows 2000 sees it now, and I can write files to it fine.

For some reason, every time I boot to Windows 2000 now I get the message in the thread title:

Invalid system disk, replace the disk and then press any key.

I hit a key and bootup proceeds normally: I multiboot Windows 98 and Windows 2000, and I see the boot selection thing and all seems to go normally.

I have no disks in my CDRW or DVD burner, no disk in my floppy drive, and of course my Primary Master boot drive is still in the boot sequence (I haven't gone in the BIOS recently).

Any clue what's going on here? I'm not terribly concerned because I plan to rebuild the system with new HDs and reinstall the OS's within a few weeks, but I would like some clue what is happening here. Thanks!!!

 

[GoatHerderEd]

My guess, and i doubt its right because it just started happening, is that the hard drive is not spun up in time or something to recognize an OS on it the first time.

But if it has the whole time to spin up in the bios, i again think im wrong.

very strange though.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: GoatHerderEd
My guess, and i doubt its right because it just started happening, is that the hard drive is not spun up in time or something to recognize an OS on it the first time.

But if it has the whole time to spin up in the bios, i again think im wrong.

very strange though.

Yeah, I don't think it's that. If I restart it happens too. Don't know. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it will be history when I reinstall Windows 2000 from scratch, which I've got to do REAL soon, 'cause it's gotten just way to flakey lately! Thanks!

 

[Muse]

I narrowed it down to one thing. It happens only when my 4th HD is hooked up. I just changed the jumpers, forcing it to slave and it still happens. I believe this started happening when I made the disk's only partition the "Active Partition." I did that with a Win95 OSR2 boot floppy using fdisk. This was after for some reason Windows 2000 didn't think the disk was formatted!!!

What should I do? Can I make that partition _unactive_ again? How does the Active Partition work? Is there only one in a system or does every HD have an active partition? My boot HD has two OS partitions:

C: (Windows 98SE)
D: (Windows 2000 SP4)

 

[Muse]

Quite fortuitously (and completely by chance), a few minutes ago I ran into a little program I downloaded a while back called aefdisk. I wondered what it was and opened the readme.txt file. It's a DOS based utility that's a great deal more versatile than fdisk. There's a more powerful shareware (registerable) version, but my freeware version supports a lot of things including activating and deactivating partitions. I didn't notice anything allowing me to deactivate a partition in fdisk or Partition Magic or anything in Windows 2000. Well, the command looked easy enough:

aefdisk 4 /deactivate

Here, the 4 was for harddisk 4. I just ran this and it reset the active flag to not-active for that HD in the partition table. The problem has disappeared.