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System won't boot

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Name: Ricky Steele
Date: February 19, 2001 at 05:39:53 Pacific
Comment:

I have a pentium 166 machine with a 3.2 gb hard drive. When I go to boot up it recognises all of the drives (hard drive, floppy drive and cd rom) but then quotes
'invalid system disk' I cannot find any way to get to the dos prompt or for windows to startup.

I only bought the computer the other day and dont know what is on the hard drive so what I want to do is to format the computer and reinstall everything. Problem is I cannot get to the dos prompt.

I wonder if there is anyone who cxan help me

Thanks in advance

Ricky



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Response Number 1
Name: Rich
Date: February 19, 2001 at 05:47:25 Pacific
Reply:

Get a boot disk if you dont have one. Power down, put boot disk in the floppy drive, restart computer, choose start w/o cd support. At A: prompt type fdisk, hit enter, wait until finished, type format C:, wait until finished, when asked to name drive just hit enter, shut down & restart, select run windows set up from cdrom.(Assuming you are using win 98 or 98SE) then follow instructions. You will loose all information on hard drive.


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Response Number 2
Name: Ricky Steele
Date: February 19, 2001 at 05:50:10 Pacific
Reply:

I think it is running win 95 but I placed a win 98 boot disk in and it still came up with 'invalid system disk' where could i get a win 95 boot disk from on the net?

Thannkyou


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Response Number 3
Name: curio
Date: February 19, 2001 at 06:30:28 Pacific
Reply:

U need to check that booting from a:\drive is enabled in the BIOS .


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Response Number 4
Name: razorbackfan1
Date: February 19, 2001 at 06:36:22 Pacific
Reply:

make sure that A drive is enabled as the first boot device in bios, make sure A drive is installed in the bios and that next to diskette A is doesn't say none. If you still have the problem try a new floppy drive.


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Response Number 5
Name: dan
Date: February 19, 2001 at 07:58:36 Pacific
Reply:
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Response Number 6
Name: chappie
Date: February 19, 2001 at 08:06:06 Pacific
Reply:

after you get the system booted from floppy the command you need to type to restore the system files and be able to reboot from HDD is
SYS C:
this will restore the system file to the HDD.

If it is win 95 be sure to get a WIN95 bootdisk or you may end up getting
"wrong version of DOS"
message.Hope This Helps

Chappie



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Response Number 7
Name: Terry
Date: February 19, 2001 at 11:27:03 Pacific
Reply:

What do you mean by 'it' recognises the Hdd, floppy and CDROM? In the BIOS or where?

Make sure that your primary bootup device in the BIOS is set at A:. Using a WIN98 floppy boot up disk, boot up. If you cannot get to a prompt, power down and disconnect the HDD and the CDROM. Reboot again. You may have to wait a minute whilst the bootup looks for a HDD. If you still cannot get to a prompt, do two things.
1) Make sure on someone elses mc that the bootup disk works.
2) If it does, ensure that the floppy drive is working OK or change it for one that you know is OK.


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