Invalid system disk on bootup

[ark05]

The other day, I was unable to boot into my Win98 system. After it posted, it simply went to a blank black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner. There was no activity. I would get the same results with my attempts to boot in safe mode. I managed to be able to boot to the dos prompt and get into my drives that way.

Thinking it was likely a corrupted Windows setup, I proceeded to reformat my C drive to reinstall a fresh Win98. No loss doing so.

After my c: drive reformatted successfully, I was no longer to access anything. On bootup, the system would always fail with "Invalid system disk. Replace the disk, and then press any key." I cannot get any prompts to access. F8 on startup does not get me to any menu. (safe mode, prompt etc). This sends me in an infinate loop of not finding a valid system disk. I get the same message when I try to use a floppy boot disk.

I noticed that in the posting that neither of my harddrives are being recognized (no pri. master or pri. slave disks identified). What happened to them after I reformatted, and how to I go about getting them back.

Jennifer

 

[MrCoffee]

when you use a boot disk you are changing the boot order to a: first right?
If so and that boot disk is good then we have a bit of a problem.

 

[MacCheese]

If you are connecting them through IDE cables it could mean that your IDE controller might be going out on your motherboard. Might have to replace motherboard, try using HDD's in a different computer. If they are good then probably your motherboard controller.

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Does the drive still have a partition on it? I had a similar problem a while back, and found out that I forgot to put the partition back on it.... you can use FDISK to do that.

 

[Nitestick]

to me it sounds like you have formatted and not re-installed the OS which would cause this message. you need to re-install windows 98.