My invalid system disc

[thezambOWNie]

right so i bought a new 80GB WD amd athlon 2600+ and a biostar mobo....and as i wait for my new windows xp pro to come i load up my old win98 for an os. mind you i used some spare parts from my old comp such as an 8x sony cdrom an old video card that cant be identified so on and so forth. so my new copy of windows gets here and i format my new hd only to find that the next time i goto boot all i get is an invalid system disc error. hmmm so i press any key as the screen indicates and NVIDIA's boot agent trys to have a go at it and nothin happens..... the boot agent eventually aborts and i get a media cable error along with another error saying the boot agent has stopped. i've set the bios to boot from the cd all i get is a
Boot CD:
then the same old message.....my bios detects the cdrom and my hardrive i've check to make sure and yes my hardrive is spinnin and not making any extra noises it appears to be fine. and just to make sure its not the hardrive i've tried booting other hds off of the computer and i get the same deal....please help i've questioned all my geeky friends and all tell me to quit being such a cheap ass and take it to the shop.

 

[Nubius]

If your friends tell you to take it to the shop then they aren't 'geeky' in the least bit. When you get that 'Invalid system disc' error....it generally means you've simply left a floppy in the floppy drive or a CD in the CD-Rom that's not an installation disk like the winXP installation disk or a memory diagnostic type disk. If it isn't any bootable media that's meant for repairing or adding to your computer via dos, then the disk doesn't need to be in there.

Have your boot sequence set to:

1: Floppy
2: CD-Rom
3: HDD-0

that's the best sequence for someone who's not insanely computer adept. If you don't have a floppy then make your CD-Rom the first bootable device. Point being make sure there are NO DISKS in your computer when you are trying to boot up.

 

[thezambOWNie]

alright so that didnt work....i dont have a floppy by the way

 

[thezambOWNie]

riiiiight well i took the xp disc out and my other hd booted just fine with that startup in the bios yet my WD is still giving me the same spew....=dead hardrive?

 

[Nubius]

So you have two HD's and a CD-rom is that correct? You had your drive with win98 on it, your new drive came and you wiped em both? Your old drive works fine with winXP installed or have you even tried that? Sorry I'm trying to better understand what you've tried and what's going on. The HD is showing up in the BIOS you said though right? But after you installed winXP it then says invalid system disk?

 

[thezambOWNie]

i have my old hardrive still that i've tried hooking up to the rest of the computer to make sure that my new drive wasnt dead and when my boot sequence was CD, then HD i got the same error message until i took my XP disc out then my old drive booted just fine....there isnt an os on my new hardrive and yes it does show up in the bios so i'm think its either a dead cdrom or hd? but like i said the hardrive doesnt make any noises like dead ones usually do and its fan and such runs just fine....

 

[thezambOWNie]

bump

 

[Nubius]

well.....and you're going to have to be honest is that winXP a pirated copy? Because you'll get that 'Invalid System Disk' if thats the case......I know this because I've taken the contents off a winXP cd..put it on my HD and attempted to make a slipstream CD and it even though it had the same files it didn't see it as the winXP disk. It did in windows...but it wouldn't boot it up. Download memtest86+ and put that on a bootable CD.....then again leave your setup as CDROm the HD as the boot sequence. If the memtest program loads you know 100% it's not the drive. And if your HD shows up in the BIOS that's usually a 99% sign that the drive is infact NOT dead...soooo it's coming back to that winXP cd that you are using. Is it a straight retail CD? You can tell me

 

[thezambOWNie]

lol your good yea its a pirated copy of windows and after you saying that i was like hey you know i'll pop in the win 98 disc see if that'll go.....yea it didnt....but ummm i guess from what i was told ealier today my cousin as a prank decided to i dont know the correct term but reconfigerd my D: so it wouldnt act as a cdrom....haha big joke didnt know he did it when i went to format....could this be why it wont go? kudos for your detective like eye seeing through my stolen software dam you bill gates and your lovly lovly monopoly.

 

[thezambOWNie]

by the way bud while i had my HD up and runnin on 98 i was tryin to put some games on it d2 sims ect. and unless the disc was SPOTLESS it wouldnt go and i'd end up with the dreaded blue screen of death. just to let u know i thought i'd be a good idea