My pc wont boot up. When I switch it on, it displays the following "BOOT DISK FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". After inserting a boot disk it will start and than display "Starting Windows 95" then after that the screen goes blank and the following is displayed on the screen A:\> which you cant delete. I've tried several times to reboot but the same happens. I recently installed a cd rom and someone told me that it has corrupted my c drive. Please advice on what to do. Thanks,

Jay... when you boot from a floppy disk, you get the A: prompt - that's how it works - welcome to the command line (& no, you can't delete it *g*). Can you read from the c: drive? Try entering dir/w c: and if you get a list of files, then the drive is still 'there'. If the hard drive is ok, then from the a: prompt enter: sys c: and if you see the message 'system transferred' all should be well. It would be a good idea to run scandisk on c: to check it for errors. Post back with progress. fyi - pretty unlikely that installing a CD drive would corrupt the hard drive

Thanks for your reply Jboy. I cannot access the c drive. I did as you said but I get an error message "Invalid Drive Specification" and when I run scandisk on c, I get the following error message, "Scandisk Cannot Examine Drive C" What next?

Seems that you have the jumpers of your drives incorrectly configured. I suppose that you have both connected to the same cable. Move the jumper in your HD to the MASTER position (Search for a stick on your drive that puts something like SLAVE, MASTER and CS to know which is, maybe it is configured as MASTER yet), and the jumper in your CD drive to the SLAVE position (ditto). Hope this helps.

Before getting too deep, is it possible your bios has simply lost its settings for the hdd? This would cause C: not to be recognised as it is no longer availabe to the pc. This could be caused by the cmos battery failing. It is unlikely the cd caused these problems, if all worked fine after it was installed. However if these problems started immediately following the cd installation, Dieymur's post above is good. CHeck jumper settings on both hdd and cd. Good luck - keep us posted.

Sure - I would have suggested checking the CMOS settings if I'd been aware of the 'invalid drive' message - that's why it's a good idea to provide as much info as possible, it can speed up the repair process ;) Were you ever able to boot the machine once you'd installed the CD drive? If not, then possibly it is a jumper problem, as suggested by dieymir. Post back with any progress.

Thanks guys, I've changed the jumper settings on the HD to master. Now this is what happens. When the CD drive is connected, I still get the disk boot failure message. When I disconnect the CD drive, "Starting Windows 95" appears, after that the following error message appears, "Windows cannot determine what configuration your computer is in." 1. Original configuration 2. (A:) 3. None of the above. Regardless of which option I select the following is displayed on the screen. "Samsung CD/DVD Rom copyright...." (this is the CD drive i've nstalled) After a few seconds it will say "No drives found aborting installation" Then after that the following line appears" C:\>C:\SAMSUNG\mscdex/D:SSCD000 Enter does not seem to work when I hit it.