Invalid System Disk.....

Hey there, I am having a bit of a problem with a pc that I have upgraded from a P2 to a P3.
I recently purchased and installed a P6S5AT motherboard. I cannot get the system to boot at all. I have had this new motherboard, new kingston 256mb DIMM SDRAM x2, new hdd, new fdd, new ide and floppy cables, used but known to be good P3 cpu, new g-force graphics card. Every time I try to boot I get past post, then an error message "Invalid system disk, replace the disk and press any key" I can boot to a dos floppy, but not to a hard drive or cd drive. I have win98 installed on another old hard drive, and cannot boot to that either. All bios settings etc are correct as far as I can tell, and the clock multiplier is set to match the 133mhz bus and 800mhz cpu. The system monitor page in the bios shows all the power supply voltages to be correct. I have tried every possible thing I can think of, but the system just will not boot. I have fdisk`d the new hdd and formatted it.
I am probably missing something simple......
I would appreciate any assistance you can provide, as I am totally stuck!

 

Since you can enter in the bios check if you see your harddisk if it is there
you have maybe a small partitions on your disk,it happen to me i have to destroy everey partitions then format and install win98.

And check you cable the power cable and the large grey one.
about the power cable push it hard i knows sometime you think it's in but it's not. If no power to hard disk that why you get this message.....

 

I am crossing my fingers, and saying the only thing you have not done(that i can see) is replace the ide cable to the hdd??(even new ones canbe bad)

Is the mobo installed in an older(or new) cabinet??

 

check bios make sure all drives and floppy is listed, if not then you may have an ide cable upside down to floppy or drive usually it does not matter how the ide cables are put in check your drive pins make sure everything is slave and master set correctly some hard drives have to be put into a single drive setting, if floppy is upside down it will show a green steady light on floppy drive. im guessing that you have the jumpers set wrong on set the hard drive to single or master only use one cd drive set it to master only run one cable to each device cable for had drive and cable for cdrom....

then other possibilties are that your motherboard wont take the hard drive size, check motherboard manufacturer site make sure that it can take hard drive size if yur hard drive is bigger than supported put extra jumper on drive to limit the hard drive size down making it smaller may let the bios see the hard disk if thats the problem, if youve tried everything including new cables and only one cable to each drive it may be possible that you have a bad drive, try old ones in there, if thats not the case the motherboards got some ide issues, i have even had problems like this with scratched cd's and or floppy disks gone bad too. try everything you can... if at anytime you have changed a cable or changed an ide cable with power going to motherboard or the system running you may have damaged the board. remember to unplug power and press power switch couple of times to get rid of remaining power in capacitors, reset the bios if need be by removing the battery pres the power button a few times then replace battery. all else fails you can try replacing power supply ram motherboard one at a time. or try the old board withthe new cdrom devices and hard drive to make sure theyre good.

 

My hard disk is showing up at the correct size in the bios, and the power to it must be ok as I was able to boot to a dos floppy and partition and format it. When I take that hdd out, and put in an old 10gb with win98 already installed, that shows up as the correct size too, but will not boot.

I had a new ide cable with the motherboard, I have a spare in the cupboard. I think I have tried swapping them around, but I will have another go. Its an old ATX tower that I have put this stuff in. It was a pentium2, now upgraded to a pentium3. About the only thing I have not changed is the power supply, and I am getting increasingly suspect that this could be the problem, its about the only thing I have not changed, swapped or fiddled with.

I have hdd jumpered as a master on one ide and the cd drive as master on the other ide. Floppy is new and working ok. When at a dos prompt I can dir the hdd, but not the optical drive, it says "drive is not high sierra" or something along those line. Not sure what that means. I have been pretty careful when changing cables etc, unplugging the tower etc. Do you think that a faulty power supply could give me this kind of error? Its about the only thing left to replace! I have tried to start the machine with the bare minimum of stuff on the board, nothing in the pci slots, just the graphics card in the agp, (no on board graphics) just the hdd and floppy, one dimm. Still the same error.

I havnt got a spare power supply, I think I might have to buy one.
What do you guys think?

 

The error message you're getting usually means that the BIOS is able to access the intended boot device but cannot find an operating system on it.

You have said that your BIOS can see the drive and correctly identifies its capacity. You've also said that you were able to boot from a floppy and FDISK and FORMAT your drive using the operating system on the floppy. Those operations would not have been possible if your power supply was inadequate or if the IDE cable was incorrectly installed. I think you can safely disregard power and cabling issues.

One thing to check (maybe you did it already): When you DIR the hard drive after booting from the floppy, does the reported capacity agree with the capacity reported by FDISK? Assuming you established a partition that is 100% of capacity, does DIR agree with the manufacturer's rated capacity (within 3%)? If those numbers aren't consistent, you've bumped up against a size barrier problem, which can have a variety of results. There are several such barriers, and they depend on the size of the hard drive, the BIOS, and the OS involved. You haven't given us much to work with there.

When you formatted the hard drive from the floppy, did you tell FORMAT to install the operating system off the floppy - whatever OS that was? If no OS was installed to the hard drive, the BIOS will report the drive as an "invalid system disk". A system disk, by definition, has an operating system installed on it.

When you set up the partition on that hard drive, did you mark it "active"? The BIOS won't look for an OS on a partition that isn't marked "active", and will report it as an invalid system disk.

When you installed the old drive with Windows 98 on it -- did you install that drive as master on the primary IDE channel? If you didn't, you'd have to re-set the boot device in your BIOS -- if you have that option.

The inability to access the CD-ROM drive when booting from the floppy probably relates to the lack of a driver for that CD-ROM drive on the boot floppy. CD-ROM support is not native to any version of DOS earlier than version 7 -- and I'm not sure about v.7. DOS 6.22 and earlier will need to have MSCDEX.EXE and a driver for your particular CD-ROM drive on the boot floppy to give you access to the CD-ROM drive.

A Windows 98SE Startup Disk should give you access to most CD-ROM drives unless your CD-ROM drive needs something unusual for a driver. If you need a Win98SE boot disk, Google the phrase "boot disk" to get several sites that will help you out. Or perhaps another member can point you in a better direction.

Get the CD-ROM drive issue resolved first. The other problem may then resolve itself, because the Windows install routine will look after all those details you had to attend to manually in FDISK. And will fix any details you missed.

Incidentally -- what OS did you boot into from the floppy disk?

 

Thanks for the reply. I wont get time to try and sort this pc out till the weekend. (damn overtime at work) I will have a go at some of the things you suggested, and report back.

 

what rob m said seems like good news for you there are several steps to correctly fdisk a drive and if you skip out on marking the partition active then you will have no partition to install to, google fdisk for a good step by step tutorial on how to fdisk properly, when i install 98 i boot from cd with support run fdisk, delete all partitions reboot run again format whole drive using 100% capacity, if you want to partition the drive further you can, however you can only mark one active. after formatting the drive i create a directory on c drive for win98 if installing 98 and copy files from d:\win98 to folder created, this keep s the setup files on drive c and will usually not require the old insert 98 cd business,not sure what op sys your however win 98 and win me can both be installed in same fashion, i used to just google setup win 98 from cd for a tutorial step by step procedure and thats how i came to learn to copy files to hard drive and install from hard drive, saves a lot of time not having to read from the old cdrom during 98 setup. just a thought for you if your installing 98 or me. you will probably be needing to just fdisk again and i would suggest finding a step by step procedure on this so you dont miss anything

 

chasezcw is right -- if you're installing Win9x to the new drive, you'll probably need to FDISK and FORMAT it first.

If you're installing WinXP, I think you can do all that during the installation, i.e., you don't need to initialize the disk first. It would be a really good idea to read the WinXP installation instructions first to find out, though.