HD problem
 

I'm helping a friend fix his laptop, and we run into this everytime we start it up: "Invalid System Drive"

what does it mean, and how do we fix it?

thanks in advance

means the hard drive isnt bootable...
boot off a win98 startup disk and see if that can access the drive... might have to format and start over... or maybe a new hard drive...

How would i format it? it won't let me go to the command prompt

use a boot disk

and if he was a stupid moron and doesn't have one.....?

search for them online... you can download one...

www.bootdisk.com

i suggest a win98 boot disk.

ok...i got the boot disk to work and everything, now what? (sorry if i seem really stupid in all of this, i'm not used to dealing with dos)

Have to format the whole drive (a:format c:) using that dos command or fdisk. Then you have to decide what kind of operating system you want to put on it. Post the specs here and you'll get tons of recomendations I'm sure. This is of course easier if the boot disk you are using has cd-rom drivers on it. Installation of the newer Windows operating systems is pretty easy, as I recall you can also format the hard drive from the Windows 2000 or Windows XP disks. Hard to really give more advice or be more specific before I know what you want to do and what kind of laptop it is....

I sure hope your friend is prepared to lose all the data thats on his drive. He is aware that a format means starting from a clean slate, right? heh.

Anyhow, to confirm Great Scott... Win98 (second ed.), Win2k, and WinXP CDs are bootable. But since you already got a boot disk, providing its the one with generic CDROM drivers on it, you should be set.

But seeing that this is a laptop... didnt it come with a restore/recovery disc? I recommend using that first if youre unsure about how to format a drive.

Ack! Good point geeky! I'm kinda new to posting help online, usually like to do it hands on, but you are 100% right, that would be the best solution for someone if they weren't sure about formatting and all that, as it seems our TFP mate Pepe is.

Note Pepe, a format will destroy all the information on the hard drive (well at least the part that we usually have access to). If you are trying to save some data inside it then you have a new problem altogether, though thankfully not necessarily unfixable. Almost everyone here will tell you however that if you are willing to sacrifice the data then go for the format and reinstall.

ok, here's the situation:

he got a really bad virus, his laptop is really old and he already has his data backed up. due to it's age, he's lost his revoery cd's etc, but i still have a win 95 cd(yeah the laptop is that old) so we decided to format and reinstall windows. which was fine since he backed everything up pre-virus.

ok i can acces the cd now, but how do i run setup.exe? i mean what's the command in dos to get it to run? (yeah i really suck at dos)

[edit]: someone told me to just type setup.exe, i did, and nothing happened, my computer paused for second, but then i was back at the command line. is there something wrong with the cd? or with my command?

Now we are getting somewhere. Okay what drive does DOS designate as the CD ROM drive? I assume it's D: as it usually is. so once you use the boot disk to get to the a: just click d:
then d:dir/p That will give you the names of all the directories on the CD page by page. I have to admit it's been so long since I have used 95, that I can't quite recall where the install program is or what it has named. Basically you are looking for files with an .exe, .bat, or .com extension. Look for one of those that looks like it might be the Windows steup program (setup95? setup? install?) and then type it in at the d: if this does not work then post again and we'll figure out a way around it.

it might be drive e if you are using win98 boot disk.

it loads the ramdrive on to d.

anyway, i bet it's setup.exe .