INVALID SYSTEM DISK 1

[ITGL72]

Needless to say, I am a little distraught. I picked up a new P4 computer for a friend that I offered to configure with Win 98 SE and load software, drivers, etc on planning to ship it out to him ASAP. I was pretty much DONE last night. When I come into the room this morning the computer was off. No other computers in my room were off so I know we didn't lose power.

I try to start this new P4 system up and I get "INVALID SYSTEM DISK, Replace the disk, and then press any key."

First off I'm concerned there may be something wrong with this machine now, and when I ship it to him out of state I'm concerned about another issue happening.

But I am wondering why from last night to this morning all of a sudden the disk is not getting booted?

When I run it to start with a boot disk and run FDISK the partition is still there. When I go to the C drive I see nothing on the drive, WHY IS THAT? Under label for the c: disk there are just dos based command line looking SQUARES and I see no files! Even though the amount of disk space available seems about the same from what I saw last night after having everything loaded.

I'm hoping there's an easier solution to bringing this system back to life other then running FDISK again and formatting, and reinstalling everything.

Does anyone have any solutions to this problem I can try? Any steps to look into before I try to reinstall Win98? Anything to look for?

By the way when I run scandisk on the c: drive it tells me the C:########.### (# = those little SQUARES you see in DOS) file or directory is damaged and is currently unusable. So I choose FIX IT, and it just keeps coming back with the same thing, asking me to FIX IT.

Your experience is greatly appreciated on this one!

 

[ben64]

wow. something on that drive must have really messed up. Did, perhaps, you have a MRI machine near the computer? Anyway, I suggest you format, and try again, if the same problem happens again, try to return, exchange, or whatever the computer.

 

[Crustyoldbloke]

Ben64

I thought I did the jokes!

Did, perhaps, you have a MRI machine near the computer?

Have a star for making me laugh so much.

Wicked or what???? File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)
Phil
Please tell me if the answer I gave was helpful or a mere bus ride out. Without your feedback I won't know.

 

[ben64]

Well, things like that may "accidentally" happen, i mean, I had a floppy I rested on top of a speaker "stupid me" And when I loaded it, there were 1024 files names %%%%%%%%.%%% and my disk had the capacty of 57 GB. I didn't even know what a GB was then. (I had a 340MB hard drive then)

And get ready, theres a new joker in town.

 

[ITGL72]

DIAGNOSTICS came up OK. Going to try and repartition and format.