Hello all, I have a relatively old HP ePC, it's a small desktop with a CD drive, no floppy, and standard ports on the back. Up until yesterday it was running windows 98 fine. I had wanted to add windows 2000 on a partition, so I created a seperate partition using partition magic 8, only I didn't know you had to restart for the partition to actually made active. So I began installing windows 2000 but when I was prompted as to where to install to my only option was my standard C: drive, and I said canceled the operation after some files were copied from my windows 2000 disc, I was asked to restart in the win2k installer, I clicked ok. Upon restart I was prompted to continue the installation of windows 2000, but I canceled it because my new partition didn't seem to be avalaible. The computer begins to boot, but partition magic takes over and creates the new partition, and makes it the primary partition, but because I canceled the install of win2k, there is no OS on this partition. Every time I boot the machine I get "invalid system disk" for obvious reasons. I have tried using my win2k disc to boot from, even after I change the BIOS to CD-ROM, it still will not boot. I have tried endless do it all utilities I have found on the web to no avail. Any ideas, help, etc? Thanks

If it left the windows folder intact it can probably be fixed. But of course you need to get it to boot from something other than the hard drive. With no floppy that leaves the cdrom. Check again that the cdrom is set as the first boot device and use the 98 cd. When the bios realizes there's a bootable cd a menu should come up asking if you want to boot from the cdrom or the hard drive. I think if you don't specify the cdrom to boot from it'll default to the hard drive. Maybe that menu isn't coming up or maybe you're missing it. Anyway, once you get it to boot up type dir/p c:\ at the dos prompt and enter. See if there's a line that says WINDOWS. . . . . <DIR>. Post back results.

i dont have a win98 cd, as i bought this pc used off of craigslist and was not given any install discs. i know the cdrom works, as i had to install partition magic from the cd before all this happened, and that was just yesterday, so the cdrom is functional. is there any way to boot something besides an os that will allow me to reformat and install win2k.

If you want to wipe out W98, then just boot from the W2K CD all the tools to create partions and format are offered during install. Thouhg if W2K is the goal then there is an appropriate forum down the page.

the only goal right now is to get it working again. i have put the win2k cd in the drive and nothing happens, BIOS is set to boot CD first then HDD, i am positive of this and i know the cd rom drive is functional.

You might want to see if the 2K cd will boot up in another computer. If so the problem is with your PC. Did you get a menu asking if you wanted to boot from the cdrom? Is it a SCSI cdrom? If so you'd need to set the boot order for SCSI first.

SCSI is not on the list of boot options, and i have yet to be prompted to boot to cd. because the machine is so small, it has a laptop cd drive in it, does this have any effect on anything?