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A friend of mine asked me to look at his pc. It shows "invalid system disk, replace disk and press enter" message at startup. The hard drive is recognized in the bios (40gb western digital). I also see ez-bios loading at startup with a "boot loader initializing" message but it is followed by invalid system disk. The hard drive works fine as a slave in another system.
I would appreciate any help getting this thing to boot back up without losing any of his existing data. I do have his original windows 98 cd if a reinstall over itself would help.
When I boot to a Win98 startup disk and try the dir command on C dirve, it shows "Volume in C drive has no label" and 8mb free. Displaying my partition table via fdisk shows:
Part Status Type Label Mb System Usage
1 A on-dos 38154 100%
C:2 pri-dos 8 Fat12
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Hi,
Find the Western Digital software and try doing a repair on the ez_bios startup. It sometimes solves that problem. You can download it at the Western Digital website.
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I assume partition 1 is non dos. That is the drive overlay partition. You booted from a bootdisk without the overlay loading. You need to keep the bootdisk out until you get the message about EZ bios loading. Then hit whatever key (probably CTRL) that gives the option to boot from the floppy drive. Put the bootdisk in then and choose to boot from the floppy.
The 8 meg partition is probably just some leftover space that was so small it could only be partitioned as fat12.
Once the overlay loads and you've successfully booted from the bootdisk you'll have normal access to the drive. Fdisk should show a fat32 partition. You then can do a DIR and see what's there.
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DAVEINCAPS,
That was the case for a while, you could let the ez-bios load then hold cntl and get a choice of booting to floppy or hard drive. If you chose hard drive, got invalid system disk still.
I think I made things worse by trying a suggestion from another post, before any was posted here, and running the command sys C:. Still won't boot of course. Now getting black screen with c: command prompt.
I'm not sure what messed this system up, virus or what they tried to do to fix it. AVG showed boot sector clean when trying to boot to hard drive.
Partition 1 is non-dos, no volume label, 38mb in size, no file system, and 100%usage.
Partition 2 is pri dos, no volume label, 8 mb in size, fat12, nothing under % usage
Do you think since this thing was using Westen Digital EZ-Bios that it would be best to just backup any files they want and start from scratch. Or is there a way to recover this thing? I already copied their pictures and such when I had it as a slave.
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Hi L.B., jibuib, DAVEINCAPS, hello everyone,
L.B.,
It sounds as though the Master Boot Record was corrupted.
Here is a copy/paste from Western Digital;
Problem:
"DISK I/O ERROR", "INVALID SYSTEM DISK", or "NO OS FOUND" error message encountered while booting to Windows 95/98/ME.Cause:
One of the conditions below exist:There is non-bootable media in the floppy drive or CD-ROM drive
The boot record of the boot drive is corrupted
Resolution:
If non-bootable media is not present in the floppy drive or CD-ROM drive, the boot record of the drive must be rewritten.Note: Any time you make changes to your boot sector, you run the risk of losing access to your data. Make sure you have a backup of your important data before attempting any repair procedures.
If EZ-BIOS was not used to originally set up the drive:I deleted that portion of it, as EZ-BIOS was used.
If EZ-BIOS is installed:
Restoring the MBR with EZ-BIOS installed:
Boot the system without any media in either the floppy drive or CD-ROM drive.
When you see a message that says, "Boot Loader Initializing, press and hold the control key to boot to a floppy", press the Ctrl key.
With the option to boot to A: or C: on the screen, insert your operating system startup disk into drive A: and press A to boot to the disk.
At the A:\> prompt, type FDISK /MBR, then press Enter.
This should rebuild your partition table. After doing this, eject the disk and reboot. You should be able to reboot into Windows and access your data.
End copy/paste
Best Regards,
Mesich
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Mesich,
Thanks for the prompt reply. Only problem is that I no longer get that boot loader initilizing message with the option to boot to A or C. I think this is because I tried the command Sys C: that I read on another post while searching for a fix.
Did I make things worse? Any other options now?
What is also confusing me is the partition 2, the small 8 gb one is the one showing as C drive when I view the partions using fdisk.
Any other help would be appreciated.
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Mesich,
Now when I boot the system it shows the bios post screen then verifying pool data then stops on a black screen with a C:\ prompt and blinking cursor. If I dir at that location, it say the volume in C has no label.
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Hi L.B., hello everyone,
Hello L.B.,
Yes, the sys c: could have possibly caused some problems as the drive had EZ-BIOS installed.
What is also confusing me is the partition 2, the small 8 gb one is the one showing as C drive when I view the partions using fdisk.
This also points to the MBR being corrupted.
What does the BIOS show for the hard drive?
What does fdisk /status show now?
Best Regards,
Mesich
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Which partition you sys'd depends on if you did it with the overlay loaded or without it loaded.
Without the overlay loading, fdisk showed the fat12 partition as C: so if you sys'd C: that's the drive it's booting from now. You can't sys a non-dos partition. However, if you sys'd C: after the overlay loaded then it's booting from the overlay partition. Do a DIR at the c:\> prompt. The amount in the 'bytes free' line should indicate which partition it's booting from.
I wouldn't think sys'ing the drive would cause the overlay message to disappear but you have an odd configuration with that extra 8 meg partition and I'm not sure what affect that may have.
If you can determine there's nothing on the 8 meg partition I'd go ahead and remove it with fdisk.
If you can't access the overlay partition, reinstalling the overlay software should fix that.
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Not seeing the EZ-BIOS screen indicates it is no longer installed in the loader chain. I didn't think that sys wrote to the mbr ...
Learn something everyday.
How important is the data ?If very important then install as slave for recovery efforts, a couple free programs are around to help with this. Much easier if the machine it is slaved in has large drive support.
I don't know, possibly EZ-BIOS could be reinstalled without reformat, maybe WD has more info.
If you go the slave method, try these tools:
DriveRescue is pretty good. No longer supported but will pull stuff from deleted partitions. This is a direct download link:
http://www.planetmirror.com/pub/majorgeeks/drives/rescue.zip
DiskInvestigator:
http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/dskinv.html
PC Inspector:
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
Restoration:
http://hccweb1.bai.ne.jp/~hcj58401/And finally, the power tool MBRWORK:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html
which can search and rebuild the partition table. oops almost forgot, another free power tool "testdisk"
http://www.cgsecurity.org/Best, and Good Luck.
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Hi,
EZbios will correct the problem most of the time if you do it early enough. The new Western Digital software is very good on that problem. I would advise you to back up what you can as I have had it fail one time out of 4 attempts at reloading the overlay. I have also used it to SAFELY remove the overlay when installing the harddrive into a computer that would recognize the full drive without using the overlay. Your success might vary but it's worth trying in most cases. Just BACKUP what you can first.
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I greatly appreciate everyone's help. I have already backed up any important stuff, mostly pictures, by putting the hard drive in my XP system.
DAVEINCAPS, I think I sys C: from a regular floppy boot as I don't think that command worked when it floppy booted via EZ-Bios.
jibuib, I think I will try to get my hands on some Western Digital EZ-Bios software and give it a try. What do I need to do, boot to it's floppy and then???
Is reinstalling windows over itself not an option since the C drive is the smaller 8 mb drive?
If I use fdisk to remove the smaller 8 mb partition, what will become C drive then?
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If you remove the fat12 partition there will be no C: drive unless the overlay software loads to give you normal dos access to the overlay partition. The 8 meg partition is irrelevent when it comes to accessing the overlay partition.
But for the time being leave it there, just in case it's performing some function I'm not aware of.
As we mentioned above, try reinstalling the overlay software. I can email you the installation disk if you don't have it. What is the model number of the WD drive?
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thanks DAVEINCAPS. i would appreciate an installation disk and a brief description of what I need to do with it if possible.
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DAVEINCAPS,
Getting closer. After my last post I was able to obtain a WD Data Lifeguards CD from someone. I booted to it and ran an overlay update and a mbr update and now the system tries to boot normally but stalls at the windows desktop with a message "RPCSS - has performed an illegal operation and will be shutdown" (invalid page fault in MSAFD.DLL)
I get this in safe mode also. I booted back to a floppy and now I only have one partition.
Partition 1 C:
Active
Pri-Dos
38154 mb
Fat32If I close the Rpcss message box it just keeps popping back up and the desktop won't finish loading.
Thanks so much for the overlay advice, now if I can just get past this.
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one more followup. after clicking the Rpcss box a bunch, it finally let me into safe mode but now with a spool32 error box that won't go away. I am going to leave it there until I can research this a little more.
I can access the desktop and all files now.
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Toward the bottom of this page is some info on that. You might try the LSPfix it links to. You should be able to run lspfix from safe mode if need be.
Since those problems can be caused by adware and spyware it'd be a good idea to download and run adaware and spybot.
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Thanks again for the info. I will look into the suggestions on that page.
Adaware SE, which was already on the system, shows clean but i see leftover folders that some stuff had been on this system.
I ran the LSP Fix from Cexx but it did pick up any to automatically fix. I don't know enough about it to check the box that says "I know what I am doing".
One other thing that I noticed is that the .exe files for internet explorer and outlook express are not where they should be. I noticed the icons where blank.
Still looking into things. Thanks again for the info. Hopefully I can post back with some success.
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At the very least you may need to reinstall internet explorer. You may also need to reinstall 98 over itself. It just depends if you can piece it back together or not.
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DAVEINCAPS,
I sincerely appreciate all of yours and eveyone else's support. Finally got this thing going ok. I deleted some lexmark files that were running in the background and I set the DCOM in the registry to N and the system booted up normally with no errors. Ran McAfee Stinger and it found the BugBear all over the place and repaired. Then cleaned a bunch of stuff off with SpySweeper and set the DCOM back to Y. I can now get online and update and such. Turns out the internet explorer and outlook express had been moved to AVG Virus Vault because of the Bugbear detection. All seems well now. Thanks again.
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hi, i get invalid system disk message when i start my laptop, i am currently running windows 98 and tried booting it and now i can start it back up. i have a start up disk but it loads all diagnostic tools and goes to the msdos prompt!, please can someone help.
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What happened to the computer between the last time it worked OK and the first time it didn't?
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jhonterry,
if you provide a little more info, some of these great experts may be able to help you. they have sure come thru for me.
you may want to start a new thread.
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