ok.... i cut my laptop on this morning and it loads like usual then it stops on a black screen and says "invalid system disk replace the disk, and then press any key" so now im on my computer trying to figure out how to fix my laptop.. anyone got any ideas? and i dont have the windows 98 install cd...

Check to see if you have a disk in the floppy drive (A) When all is said and done More is said than done..

If you don't have a disk in you A: drive it might be a faling hard disk, On my older IBM (PC 350) I have to pound on it a couple of times one I start it from a cold boot or it gives me an INVALID SYSTEM DISK OR DISK ERROR PRESS ANY KEY TO RESTART after the BIOS screen. Customer: Do you have any mouse pads? Salseman pointing: Over there. Customer: Great!, will they be comadible with my computer.

To go beyond the sage advice offered in #2 - try entering your CMOS setup and ensure that the hard drive is correctly listed. If so, you might want to try booting from a floppy and entering sys c: .. to see if restoring the system files is what's needed. If you don't have a bootdisk, download from here and execute the file in order to create one. You'll want to use the same version of Windows that's installed on your laptop Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience

I have the boot.exe on tha floppy disk now how do i boot it from tha floopy disk? o yea pounding on it dindt work and i dont have a floppy disk in it

No, no - you cannot boot from the file, you execute (run) the file from another computer to create a bootable floppy Is your hard drive recognized in the CMOS setup? If not, kind of a show stopper Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience

sounds like your boot partition got corrupted. lol ya when you run the boot disk it will copy its files to your A: (explaining this to my father took about 3 days, so dont feel stupid or something). Oh ya, if the computer your using now and the one that broke are using win98, if ya dont understand about the boot disk thing (or to save time in the future) you can go to control panel>>>add-remove programs>>>and there should be a tab on the top of the window that comes up saying "boot disk" or "system disk" or something of the sort (last tab) and once u click that there will be a button saying "make boot disk". Note that sometimes it may ask you to put in the 98 cd so... ya it would help ya out alot to "obtain" a copy of 98 installation down the road for future problems. Sometimes when installing stuff it asks me to put in the 98 cd (a good example of this is networking setup) so ya try and look for one. Anyway after you get a boot disk then stick it in the floppy drive and boot up the comp... then when ya get a c:\ (if theres a menu that comes up, just press shift+f5) or an a:\ type in the following: C:\windows\win where windows is the directory your windows installation is and C is the hard disk its on. that command above is probably the most typical setup for most computers so try it. the last part of it (win) is like this batch file or something that boots up windows. NOte that booting this way will ignore all the stuff that you have in your autoexec so some really advanced or older programs may not function properly. this is how you can boot to make sure that your windows isn't screwed up. To re-write the boot partion though (without the 98 cd) so it automaticaly starts up every time is beond my knoledge but someone else on this site most likely knows something about it. 2 wrongs make a right, and three rights make a left.