Tom's Guide | Tom's Hardware | Tom's Games
 |
 |
 |
Hi
I hope someone can help me.
I have a Dell Inspiron 300 laptop with a CDRom drive. I keep receiving a message when starting the laptop of "Invalid System Disk Replace the disk, and then press any key"
I have an external floppy drive attached to the laptop but when I go into the setup it is telling me that the floppy drive is disabled.
I can't seem to find a way of changing the disable option to enabled as the cursor won't highlight the floppy drive option.
I am desperately trying to install Windows 98 on this machine.
Many thanks in advance for your help
H
Im not sure if the win98 cd is bootable, you could try checking bios or setup for an option to change the order of boot devices and make the cdrom the first boot device. If the cd is bootable, that might solve the problem for you.
0 
This means that you have a partition set to active and there is no info on it. Boot a DOS 6.21 bootdisk in the drive and when you get to the a: type in fdsik. The go through the choices and set the active partition. Need help email me bquinn@vvdnetsolutions.com
0
Cheers
I will try this tonight. Many thanks for your offer of help, I may well take you up on it.
Wish me luck
H
0
Well .. first of all, the Win98 install CD disk IS bootable unless it's a pirate copy. So, resetting the boot order in the bios should work just fine. As for the floppy drive, depending on how it's setup (it's external so it might be on any kind of port including Parallel, USB, Firewire, etc.), you may need DOS drivers for it (which makes it pretty useless for booting unless there's a BIOS tweak that will let it get by).
Seems to be a bit of bad "skinny" going on in response to your post. I've had to fix a lot of problems that helpful friends have offered to my customers .. when the advice was just plain wrong. Mostly, too many FDISK, FORMAT, Reinstall suggestions when all that's needed is to find out what's wrong and fix that. Scorched earth is not always in your interest (especially when you don't have a burner to backup & save data).
Don
0
henry,
I just changed the boot order on my computer and put in a ms win98 cd and got to the win98 setup screen just fine.hey,
How can a boot disk be used if the drive is inaccessable?
0
A little note to Don Miller. You might consider, as you wander to and thro through life's in's and out's, that "all," "none," "never," and "allways" are pretty wide sweeping.
The point, here, is, the I (me) have a copy of STORE bought RETAIL Whambow 98SECOND EDITION that WILL NOT BOOT in ANY cdrom drive or computer that I've tried it in.
IT IS NOT a PIRATE copy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The conclusion? "Not all" copies of Whimpows 98 will boot!!!!!
0  |
 |
 |
This post is quite old and has been locked from receiving new replies. Please create a new posting instead.
| Ads by Google |
