"Invalid System Disc" error....

[bluelena69]

I am pretty decent working with computers but have one that stumps me. I have an old laptop given to me by my boss. It is a Hitachi Visionbook 5000 Plus. I think it is 233Mhz w/ 10GD HD, cd-rom, no floppy. Windows 98se was/is installed. I cleaned some stuff from the registry,etc the other day and upon rebooting, got the "invalid system disc" message. I have gone into the bios and changed the settings so that the cd-rom boots 1st. However the bios does not seem to see it. I understand that this means little because sometimes they just do not show up. I have what I think is a good 98se boot disc, but it does nothing when I reboot. I know the cd-rom is working, because I have a Linux Live CD that runs when I boot with it. What should I do? Does it seem like the 98 boot disc I have may be bad? Hard drive shot?

Thanks

 

[DaveBurnett]

Create a bootable CD from the 98se boot disk http://www.bootdisk.com and try that.

 

[Rollin' Rog]

The invalid system disk error is resolved about half the time by running the command:

sys c:

from the a: prompt using a bootdisk for the Operating System version installed.

If you can create a bootable CD with the right OS files on it, you can try that. A successful command returns the message "system files transfered".

 

[Bob Cerelli]

I have a section with instructions for creating a boot disk at:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/install/floppies.htm

There is also the generic one which you can download and at:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software/win98_img.exe

Just insert and floppy and run the program after you download it. This will automatically format, copy the files to the floppy disk.

There are a lot of the DOS utilities there that don't normally get added when you make one from Win98. For example Diskcopy, Doskey, Format, More, Move, Sys, Edit, Chkdsk, Deltree, Extract, Updated Fdisk, Attrib, Label, Mem, Scandisk, Scanreg, Smartdrv and Xcopy.

Not only are there more utilities on there but it starts much faster since it doesn't have to create the RAM disk and then expand the cab file from the floppy to that RAM disk.

It automatically loads with support for a generic CD ROM and assigns it the drive letter of X:

There is also a CD ROM boot image you can download at:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software/win_boot.iso

In addition to all the other DOS utilities, the CD version also has:
DELPART - For deleting DOS and NTFS partitions. Can delete extended NTFS partitions.
FDISK121 - FDISK with additional options - See the documentation, and
READNTFS - Read and Copy files on a NTFS partition.

The CD image needs to be burned using a program that recognized ISO images.