Win9x - "Invalid system disk"

[FatAlbo]

Okay, friend of mine just got this error on his rig on boot. I haven't had a chance to look at it personally so I don't know if the hard drive has been corrupted or if it somehow magically became an unbootable partition. If it's the latter, is there anyway to make a FAT32 partition bootable again WITHOUT having to reformat it? Thanks in advance.

 

[NicColt]

try and do a chkdsk first.

 

[Daxxax]

Not trying to be a smart a$$, but make sure there isn't a floppy in the disk drive. It's happened to the best of us.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: Daxxax
Not trying to be a smart a$$, but make sure there isn't a floppy in the disk drive. It's happened to the best of us.

If you can clean boot from a floppy, check for virus on the hard drive.

 

[FatAlbo]

It's all good. It was the first question (floppy in the drive) I asked my friend last night because I didn't get a chance to look at it until today. I'm pretty sure it was a virus that messed up his hard drive because all the essential Win9x files like iosub.sys and msdos.sys were missing.

I was too lazy to figure out how to recover those files and keep his Win95 install, so I just used one of those factory restore CDs. That's what he gets for downloading pr0n and not backing it up.

 

[KillerCow]

I'm pretty sure it was a virus that messed up his hard drive because all the essential Win9x files like iosub.sys and msdos.sys were missing.

For future reference. Make a system disk from a clean machine with the same version of 9x and copy sys.com (sys.exe) to the boot floppy. Boot from that disk. Then type "sys c:"

sys copies all of the system files needed to make a disk bootable.