Hi there! When i turn on my laptop, i get the Invalid System Disk message. There is no floppy/cdrom drive connected to the laptop. I can connect the hard-disc to my PC through a 3.5" to 2.5" converter, and the disk boots as i expected, but when I put it in the laptop, I get the Invalid system disk message! I have a Windows 98 SE boot disk, which I used to format the drive (when it was in my PC), and copy the system files (io.sys, msdos.sys etc). The disk is partitioned as follows: C: - 7.8Gb FAT32, D: 10Gb FAT32, E: 1Gb FAT32. The only difference between the IDE setup, is that the Hard-disc is connected on the secondary channel (as Primary) in my PC, whilst it is on the first channel (as Primary) in the laptop. Would this difference have any effect when copying the system files? Is it possible that the disc is damaged? or Have i just missed out something crucial? Laptop in question is a Twinhead PowerSlim P90, 300Mhz CPU w/ 64mb RAM. Thanks in advance Andy Vincent

Has the laptop ever worked as expected? W98 expects to be setup on the hardware it is to run on. Do you have a network connection? Will the laptop boot to BIOS setup? It may be possible to load W98 from a shared floppy via network to correct the installation.

The laptop BIOS won't let me boot from a network connection unfortuatly, and not from USB either (i have a USB memory stick that can boot linux). All i want to do is get it to boot to DOS at the moment.

In that case, I don't believe there is a solution that does not involve the availability of a floppy or CD-ROM drive attached to the laptop. Do you know someone with an external floppy drive that you could borrow long enough to boot your W98 disk and make repairs? This seem to me to be the most expedient fix, assuming you don't want to buy one.

ok, thanks very much for your help.

horray! got it to work! I re-paritioned the drive using Partition Magic, and made the first parition 2gb and FAT (not FAT32), copy the system files, and voila! the laptop now boots to DOS! now onto installing Windows XP :-)

You are going to have a problem with XP on a 2gb drive. It will barely fit.