laptop invalid system disk

[alphasigmookie]

my girlfriends laptop won't boot. when she starts it up it says invalid system disk, replace and press any key. she only has a cd drive and a harddrive installed. there is no cd in the drive. in the bios it detects both the drives. my initial diagnosis was that her hd died? it's an old laptop....pentium 200, but she doesn't have the money for a new system now and only needs it for email. is it possible that she just corrupted a few of the wrong files? could a format and reinstall fix the problem? any suggestions before i go to too much trouble.

 

[AtTheGates]

Try taking the floppy drive out of the boot sequence. I like having Knoppix around when dealing with a problem like this. Boot from the cd a see if it can read the hard disk,

 

[amdskip]

I would try a reinstall, maybe it'll work.

 

[Slikkster]

I wouldn't go the reinstall route yet. Might be an easier fix.

Does this laptop have a floppy drive at all? Hard to imagine an older laptop without a floppy, but I guess that's true for some. If so, make a Windows 98SE bootdisk from bootdisk.com. (This IS Windows 98, right? You didn't say.)

If you can boot with a Windows 98 bootdisk, when it gets to the A: prompt, type (without quotes) "sys c:"

This will reinstall the system files to the c: drive and may very well fix the problem.

If she doesn't have a floppy, if the CDROM drive bootable? You'll have to create a bootable CDR bootdisk. Bootdisk.com has instructions on how to create a bootable CDR bootdisk as well.

First, though, you should have an antivirus bootable CD and scan that drive for viruses before doing anything else.

 

[alphasigmookie]

Thanks guys, i tried the boot disk, but no luck. It did however work when I re-installed windows. Unfortunatly she hadn't saved any of her set-up/systems disks so i had to install windows XP on the system because it was the only thing I had. Anyone have any clue where I could get an old 64mb moduel of EDO notebook ram to upgrade to 128 mb for winXP? or know where I can get a cheep copy of windows 98 to install instead?