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Invalid System Disk

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by damasta_420

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Im having a problem with this error that I have never seen before. Everytime I shut my computer down, and reboot again the next day or a couple hours later, I'll get an "Invalid System Disk" error. This only happens after the computer has been previously shut down completely. I've ran chkdsk /f , /fixmbr ....still no luck. Any ideas?

ps: running Win XP

8 replies

by guruofdos

Left a floppy disk in the drive, or a CD in the cd rom drive ( and have bios set to boot from cd first)?

Just a thought!

Either that or your BIOS battery is dead and losing the IDE settings.

by damasta_420

There are no disks in the floppy drive, of course this is the obvious. I don't think it would be the CMOS battery, because usually if it is going dead windows will lose time slowly.

by guruofdos

If you have this setting in your BIOS, enable it for 3 seconds. Yes, it adds 3 seconds to the POST time but some 'instant on' computers can boot before the hard drive spins up properly, generating this error.

by maxwell edison

...after you get that error. Do you press enter or something and then successfully boot up? I would surmise that you do something to get it up and going or else you wouldn't have said, "every time you shut down".

One possibility is that you have a drive other than C-Drive selected as the first boot device in the BIOS. If you don't have a CD or floppy in the respective drive, you may have a second hard drive (or a second partition on a single drive), and the second drive is selected as the first boot device in your BIOS. After you press enter, it then goes on to the second boot device, which is C-Drive. If this is the case, change your first boot device to C-Drive.

If C-Drive is already your first boot device, it's possible that the command.com and/or another boot file may be missing or is corrupted. If this is the case, you can go into the Recovery Console and issue the fixboot and/or fixmbr and/or bootcfg/rebuild commands to repair them.

By the way, you may get more replies if this was posted in the Q&A section. (It really belongs there anyway.) The more points you assign, the more it might get noticed.

by don_c

I agree with Max this needs to be in Q&A so I will tell a little story. I built a new system for my self. that I was pretty proud of it. had a WD 8gig in it then my son come home from collage and gave me a 40gig seagate. work great for about six months then had power surges form hell. despite my battery back system the HD kept coming up with invalid system disk. done everthing i could to fix the problem. then finnaly I reinstall W2K pro. the problem kept coming back i would go into my bios to just go in and save&exit I know it was in the bios and I just lived with the problem then Then I built me another comp and made the one i had problems with a file sever and installed W2K sever so far no problems.

The morral to this story is never use a seagate even if its free cause you get what you pay for

by guruofdos

A Fujitsu MPG3xxx series?

Do a Google search for FUJITSU DRIVE FAILURE and s**t yourself when you see the failure rate and the legal actions going on!!!

by mrbill-

I will not use seagate HDs, too much like conner drives, which they bought out if I remember right. The old WD drives used to have a jumper pair named CP which was Conner Present, that is how difficult conner drives were to work with.

by agent|

One of our workstations bsod'd while the user was in the middle of an office app. Rebooted and got the "invalid system disk" error. Upon careful observation of the boot up, I noticed the hard drive was not being detected. In the bios, I tried an auto-detect and it came up with nothing. A little basic troubleshooting and I replaced the IDE cable after determining the hard drive was ok, I put into a test machine as a slave and it was detected right away. It booted up smoothly after replacing the cable. I inspected the cable and saw nothing physically wrong with it, but oh well, its in the trash and the user is happy.

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