Invalid System Disk

[Farrar]

I ran into a strange problem today that I did resolve but I was curious to see if anyone has seen something identical to this before.

I rebooted this afternoon only to see the “Invalid system disk…” message. Well, I rebooted with my Windows 98 boot disk in to try scanning or restoring the registry but upon typing scanreg at the prompt, I only got the message, “ Error reading drive G.” Drive G is my CD-ROM. I have in my extended partition 4 logical drives with D being for Applications, E is for W2K Server, F is for W2K Pro, G is for Windows XP Professional, and H and I are my CD-ROM and CD burner respectively. Since E and F are both NTFS and Windows does not see them, drive F should have been listed as the CD-ROM but that’s neither here nor there. All I had done to my system was to use one of these CD cleaning CDs on both the CD-ROM and burner. I rebooted and got the error message. Funny, while in FDISK at the “Display Partition Information” screen, I never saw anything about a Non-DOS partition as I have in the past. And, I did try to choose another OS from my boot menu at startup with no luck. I chose Windows 2000 Pro, pressed “control-alt-delete”, typed in my password, saw the messages saying it was preparing network connections, loading settings, etc. I heard the familiar sound that it makes when the desktop appears BUT was back at the logon screen again.

I simply reinstalled Windows 98 back in C drive and everything is back to normal. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Jeff

[Antimatter]

[quote]Originally posted by Farrar:
<strong>I chose Windows 2000 Pro, pressed “control-alt-delete”, typed in my password, saw the messages saying it was preparing network connections, loading settings, etc. I heard the familiar sound that it makes when the desktop appears BUT was back at the logon screen again.
</strong><hr></blockquote>

It will do this when the drive letters have been changed for the 2k installation drive.

The invalid system disk error would indicate either a boot sector virus or damaged system files. Possibly a corrupt MBR on the C drive partition.