I have been given this laptop which had light use. When I power it up, I hear a normal whir of the HD and a couple of clicks from the Toshiba DVD/CD-ROM drive. I get the Dell splash screen with the instruction “Press F2 to enter set-up” at the bottom. I then get a DOS black screen with the message “Invalid System Disk, Replace the disk, and then press any key”. I’ve removed both the battery, HDD, and DVD, inspected and then replaced them. From the set-up utility, I’ve re-ordered the boot-up list so that ‘Hard drive is first on the list. I’ve also tried to boot from the floppy and CD-Rom drives. No luck. The HD is an IBM20004MB (TravelStar?). The OS is/was XP and the processer is a Intel P4/1.6. I’m thinking of gambling and ordering a replacement HD to see if that solves the problem and is not something worse like an HDD controller issue. My questions are: 1) Is there any way to get Windows running in its current state (at least get to Safe Mode where I can check devices)? and if not, what would be a decent HD replacement part? I do not need to recover any data on the current HD. Thanks in advance for your help!
