A computer components & hardware forum. HardwareBanter

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Go Back   Home » HardwareBanter forum » General Hardware & Peripherals » Homebuilt PC's
Site Map Home Register Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

Invalid system disk



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old November 17th 04, 11:38 PM
seabat
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Invalid system disk

Howdy:

I've got this old Hewitt Rand 'puter that I'm trying to get running.
It has a 120MHz CPU (unknown make), 16MB RAM, Windows 95 (supposed to
be loaded on drive?). I turn the machine on and it goes through the
POST and then displays all the CPU, hard disk, Plug and Play info and
some stuff about PCI devices.

It then displays this:
External Cache Type : Pipelined BUrst
EDO in DRAM Row(s) : 0

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and then press any key

There is no disk in the drives! I've tried starting it up with a Win95
start-up disk, with Win95 CD in CD-ROM, a combination of the two and I
still get to this point only. I've been into the BIOS (American) and
everything seems kosher there. The floppy lites up and you can hear it
accessing the disk, but that's it! If I could get it to a command
promt I would be very happy. Any ideas?

Thanks.

--
The Seabat
  #2  
Old November 18th 04, 12:53 AM
Dave C.
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default


"seabat" wrote in message
...
Howdy:

I've got this old Hewitt Rand 'puter that I'm trying to get running.
It has a 120MHz CPU (unknown make), 16MB RAM, Windows 95 (supposed to
be loaded on drive?). I turn the machine on and it goes through the
POST and then displays all the CPU, hard disk, Plug and Play info and
some stuff about PCI devices.

It then displays this:
External Cache Type : Pipelined BUrst
EDO in DRAM Row(s) : 0

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and then press any key

There is no disk in the drives! I've tried starting it up with a Win95
start-up disk, with Win95 CD in CD-ROM, a combination of the two and I
still get to this point only. I've been into the BIOS (American) and
everything seems kosher there. The floppy lites up and you can hear it
accessing the disk, but that's it! If I could get it to a command
promt I would be very happy. Any ideas?

Thanks.


OK, two possibilities. First, is the CMOS battery dead? If so, you might
have to replace it and then re-detect or re-program the hard drive settings
in BIOS.

Second possibility is that the hard drive was formatted, and boot sequence
is set to hard drive FIRST. In that case, you will get "invalid system
disk". You won't necessarily be able to boot a floppy disk that way. -Dave


  #3  
Old November 18th 04, 06:49 AM
seabat
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:53:07 -0500, "Dave C." wrote:


OK, two possibilities. First, is the CMOS battery dead? If so, you might
have to replace it and then re-detect or re-program the hard drive settings
in BIOS.


Replaced the battery. BIOS wouldn't detect hard drive (1.28GB) so
entered info manually. Still no go!

Second possibility is that the hard drive was formatted, and boot sequence
is set to hard drive FIRST. In that case, you will get "invalid system
disk". You won't necessarily be able to boot a floppy disk that way. -Dave


The BIOS boot sequence is set in this order: A, C, CD-ROM.
Still no joy! As usual, my luck is holding.......at zilch!


--
The Seabat
  #4  
Old November 18th 04, 12:18 PM
Dave C.
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default


"seabat" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:53:07 -0500, "Dave C." wrote:


OK, two possibilities. First, is the CMOS battery dead? If so, you
might
have to replace it and then re-detect or re-program the hard drive
settings
in BIOS.


Replaced the battery. BIOS wouldn't detect hard drive (1.28GB) so
entered info manually. Still no go!

Second possibility is that the hard drive was formatted, and boot
sequence
is set to hard drive FIRST. In that case, you will get "invalid system
disk". You won't necessarily be able to boot a floppy disk that
ay. -Dave


The BIOS boot sequence is set in this order: A, C, CD-ROM.
Still no joy! As usual, my luck is holding.......at zilch!


Damn. In that case, you might have a bad IDE controller. -Dave


  #5  
Old November 18th 04, 01:04 PM
David Maynard
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

seabat wrote:

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:53:07 -0500, "Dave C." wrote:



OK, two possibilities. First, is the CMOS battery dead? If so, you might
have to replace it and then re-detect or re-program the hard drive settings
in BIOS.



Replaced the battery. BIOS wouldn't detect hard drive (1.28GB) so
entered info manually. Still no go!


Second possibility is that the hard drive was formatted, and boot sequence
is set to hard drive FIRST. In that case, you will get "invalid system
disk". You won't necessarily be able to boot a floppy disk that way. -Dave



The BIOS boot sequence is set in this order: A, C, CD-ROM.
Still no joy! As usual, my luck is holding.......at zilch!



Remove the hard drive. Strange as it may seem, a dead hard drive can cause
both floppy and CD boot failure. Same goes for a bad CD-Drive and floppy as
well so you might need to try each one separately to resolve it.

Plus, since you're having problems with an 'unknown' system, meaning you've
never seen it run, you should not 'assume' that anything on it is cabled or
jumpered correctly. I.E. check it all.




  #6  
Old November 19th 04, 12:04 AM
Mr Koko
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default



Remove the hard drive. Strange as it may seem, a dead hard drive can cause both floppy and CD boot
failure. Same goes for a bad CD-Drive and floppy as well so you might need to try each one
separately to resolve it.

Plus, since you're having problems with an 'unknown' system, meaning you've never seen it run, you
should not 'assume' that anything on it is cabled or jumpered correctly. I.E. check it all.





I agree with HD problem especially if the 'puter has been sitting for a while. What I ran into once
with a Compaq was the same thing. How I got it running was to lift the front of the pc up about 4 or
5" during boot up just before the error message and then drop it! The jolt got the drive spinning up
and it booted fine after that.
My computer was sitting in a unheated garage for a couple of months during cold weather and I didn't
care too much about it since I was using my "new" system in a heated house. Come to think of it I
might of dropped it a couple of times in rapid succession to get it going, either way I had nothing
to lose. (the PC repair guys are probable mad at me now for letting their biggest repair trick out
of the bag :-)

MrKoko


  #7  
Old November 19th 04, 12:22 AM
Martin G.1.0
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default



"Mr Koko" wrote in message
...


Remove the hard drive. Strange as it may seem, a dead hard drive can
cause both floppy and CD boot failure. Same goes for a bad CD-Drive and
floppy as well so you might need to try each one separately to resolve
it.

Plus, since you're having problems with an 'unknown' system, meaning
you've never seen it run, you should not 'assume' that anything on it is
cabled or jumpered correctly. I.E. check it all.





I agree with HD problem especially if the 'puter has been sitting for a
while. What I ran into once with a Compaq was the same thing. How I got it
running was to lift the front of the pc up about 4 or 5" during boot up
just before the error message and then drop it! The jolt got the drive
spinning up and it booted fine after that.
My computer was sitting in a unheated garage for a couple of months during
cold weather and I didn't care too much about it since I was using my
"new" system in a heated house. Come to think of it I might of dropped it
a couple of times in rapid succession to get it going, either way I had
nothing to lose. (the PC repair guys are probable mad at me now for
letting their biggest repair trick out of the bag :-)

MrKoko


With the large heatsinks used today, the socket might rip right out of the
motherboard if you drop it too hard (I've seen this on PC's that have been
shipped), not to mention cracking the motherboard or something else.

Then there is also the old "shock damage" that may occur.



..


  #8  
Old November 19th 04, 01:40 AM
Shepİ
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 16:38:08 -0600 The moonlight laughed on the
blade's edge when seabat wrote :

Howdy:

I've got this old Hewitt Rand 'puter that I'm trying to get running.
It has a 120MHz CPU (unknown make), 16MB RAM, Windows 95 (supposed to
be loaded on drive?). I turn the machine on and it goes through the
POST and then displays all the CPU, hard disk, Plug and Play info and
some stuff about PCI devices.

It then displays this:
External Cache Type : Pipelined BUrst
EDO in DRAM Row(s) : 0

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and then press any key

There is no disk in the drives! I've tried starting it up with a Win95
start-up disk, with Win95 CD in CD-ROM, a combination of the two and I
still get to this point only. I've been into the BIOS (American) and
everything seems kosher there. The floppy lites up and you can hear it
accessing the disk, but that's it! If I could get it to a command
promt I would be very happy. Any ideas?

Thanks.


From your boot floppy issue the command
sys c: and press Enter and see if remaking the drive a system drive
helps?



--
Free Windows/PC help,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/trouble.html
remove obvious to reply
email
Free original songs to download and,"BURN" :O)
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/8/nomessiahsmusic.htm
  #9  
Old November 19th 04, 03:22 AM
John Doe
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Shepİ wrote:
The moonlight laughed on the blade's edge when seabat wrote :

Howdy:

I've got this old Hewitt Rand 'puter that I'm trying to get running.
It has a 120MHz CPU (unknown make), 16MB RAM, Windows 95 (supposed to
be loaded on drive?). I turn the machine on and it goes through the
POST and then displays all the CPU, hard disk, Plug and Play info and
some stuff about PCI devices.

It then displays this:
External Cache Type : Pipelined BUrst
EDO in DRAM Row(s) : 0

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and then press any key

There is no disk in the drives! I've tried starting it up with a
Win95 start-up disk, with Win95 CD in CD-ROM, a combination of the
two and I still get to this point only. I've been into the BIOS
(American) and everything seems kosher there. The floppy lites up
and you can hear it accessing the disk, but that's it! If I could
get it to a command promt I would be very happy. Any ideas?

Thanks.


From your boot floppy issue the command
sys c: and press Enter and see if remaking the drive a system drive
helps?


He can't "get to a command prompt".








Path: newssvr11.news.prodigy.com!newsswing.news.prodigy. com!prodigy.net!newsmst01a.news.prodigy.com!prodig y.com!atl-c02.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!peer01. cox.net!cox.net!in.100proofnews.com!in.100proofnew s.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail
From: Shep¸
Newsgroups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Subject: Invalid system disk
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 00:40:55 +0000
Lines: 40
Message-ID:
References:
Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de pxqRYLVqHiv6WVsS92X+qgvL6ZLFP+Vpbz6IxHDt/rp2U5Mkc=
X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.8/32.553
Xref: newsmst01a.news.prodigy.com alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt:422328


  #10  
Old November 19th 04, 03:24 AM
Shepİ
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 02:22:00 GMT The moonlight laughed on the blade's
edge when John Doe wrote :

Shepİ wrote:
The moonlight laughed on the blade's edge when seabat wrote :

Howdy:

I've got this old Hewitt Rand 'puter that I'm trying to get running.
It has a 120MHz CPU (unknown make), 16MB RAM, Windows 95 (supposed to
be loaded on drive?). I turn the machine on and it goes through the
POST and then displays all the CPU, hard disk, Plug and Play info and
some stuff about PCI devices.

It then displays this:
External Cache Type : Pipelined BUrst
EDO in DRAM Row(s) : 0

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and then press any key

There is no disk in the drives! I've tried starting it up with a
Win95 start-up disk, with Win95 CD in CD-ROM, a combination of the
two and I still get to this point only. I've been into the BIOS
(American) and everything seems kosher there. The floppy lites up
and you can hear it accessing the disk, but that's it! If I could
get it to a command promt I would be very happy. Any ideas?

Thanks.


From your boot floppy issue the command
sys c: and press Enter and see if remaking the drive a system drive
helps?


He can't "get to a command prompt".


Not even from a boot floppy?



--
Free Windows/PC help,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/trouble.html
remove obvious to reply
email
Free original songs to download and,"BURN" :O)
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/8/nomessiahsmusic.htm
 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
On the brink of madness... I.C. Koets General 18 January 31st 05 11:49 PM
Disk boot failure insert system disk and press enter Lambo Homebuilt PC's 4 October 14th 04 01:42 AM
Problem with an 80gig hard drive WD Brigitte J. General 19 May 27th 04 12:03 AM
ABIT VP6 "ERROR LOADING OPERATING SYSTEM" revised SiLapuLapu Homebuilt PC's 0 October 14th 03 10:58 PM
Cooling Questions Peter Cavan Overclocking 37 September 2nd 03 06:42 AM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 04:48 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright İ2004-2024 HardwareBanter.
The comments are property of their posters.