Invalid system disk

marcusw

I tried reinstalling XP on an old laptop and ran into difficulty.

After formatting, I booted from the XP CD (which took a few goes) but during the installation I got a load of error messages saying that files could not be copied to the hard drive. I assumed that the CDROM drive was broken as it was acting funny (but now I'm not sure, works half the time!) and used Knoppix to get a copy of the XP CD onto the hard drive. I assumed incorrectly again that this would install if I could boot from the hard drive as it has an autorun file on it, but I just get the error message "Invalid system disk" at start up. Also, can't run setup.exe from the c: drive using a bootdisk as it will not run in DOS.

The hard disk seems alright when used with Knoppix so I don't think it's that.

The laptop is fairly old (Dell inspiron 8200).
It's got a floppy, a CDROM which works eventually and with Knoppix I can mount USB flash drives.


Any ideas?
Any help would be appreciated!

B00MSTICK

Is there a floppy in the drive?

marcusw

No... checked that.

Capt'n Midnight

First if the laptop did not come with an XP license you will need a non-OEM transferrable copy of XP license to be able to install

if the disk was formatted as NTFS then a dos boot disk is of no use

you could reformat to fat 32 and get a dos boot disk from bootdisk.org
you need to run the lock command to unlock the drive before running winnt or setup

marcusw

I have it fat32 file system on the hard drive.

Can you tell me more about this lock command, sounds like it might be what I'm looking for?

Capt'n Midnight

Lock is only of use when you are able to run setup , and only on some versions of dos

use a boot disk to make the disk dos bootable using the SYS command then try and run setup when drive boots


if it still don't boot you may need to use fdisk to set the partition active

marcusw

Hmmm... Now it won't boot from the floppy.

I had to use Knoppix to transfer the boot files onto the floppy disk as I don't have another floppy drive. I don't see why but would this be the reason? Also, I assumed if I just transfer the boot files onto a disk that it would ok.

I've been trying to do this for several days now and I just can't seem to get it to work. I've reinstalled XP on several macheines before and never encountered problems as persistent as these

I'm sure I formated the hard drive correctly using fdisk and set it to active (nothing fancy, just one fat32 partition).

I'm starting to think that maybe it is a BIOS problem (the boot sequence for the drives is set up correctly for the record). May I need to flash the BIOS? Does anyone know a good link for someone who hasn't done this before?

Capt'n Midnight

you can't make a disk bootable just by copying files to it
use another windows machine to make the bootable disks from bootdisk.org