INVALID SYSTEM DISK

[ITGL72]

Needless to say, I am a little distraught. I picked up a new P4 computer for a friend that I offered to configure with Win 98 SE and load software, drivers, etc on planning to ship it out to him ASAP. I was pretty much DONE last night. When I come into the room this morning the computer was off. No other computers in my room were off so I know we didn\'t lose power.

I try to start this new P4 system up and I get \"INVALID SYSTEM DISK, Replace the disk, and then press any key.\"

First off I\'m concerned there may be something wrong with this machine now, and when I ship it to him out of state I\'m concerned about another issue happening.

But I am wondering why from last night to this morning all of a sudden the disk is not getting booted?

When I run it to start with a boot disk and run FDISK the partition is still there. When I go to the C drive I see nothing on the drive, WHY IS THAT? Under label for the c: disk there are just dos based command line looking SQUARES and I see no files! Even though the amount of disk space available seems about the same from what I saw last night after having everything loaded.

I\'m hoping there\'s an easier solution to bringing this system back to life other then running FDISK again and formatting, and reinstalling everything.

Does anyone have any solutions to this problem I can try? Any steps to look into before I try to reinstall Win98? Anything to look for?

By the way when I run scandisk on the c: drive it tells me the C:########.### (# = those little SQUARES you see in DOS) file or directory is damaged and is currently unusable. So I choose FIX IT, and it just keeps coming back with the same thing, asking me to FIX IT.

Your experience is greatly appreciated on this one!

[IRL337]

shoot man, beats me.  ive never seen any lil squares.  when i have problems like that i always start with hardware first.  I know you already got everythign loaded once, however i would re-seat all the ribbon cables, double check master/slave jumpers, then in bios under drives... use the auto configuration or auto detect... if it still doesnt come up and auto detect doesnt see the C: drive, look at those ribbon cables again, look for kinks, copper shining thru etc.  If none of that solves anythign i wouldnt waste any more time and id just rebuild it.  Make sure when your gettin windows updates and drivers youre constantly restarting your pc....  nothing insures a good clean install other than restarting after every driver and set of windows updates .....hope that helps.

[Anonymous]

Try using one of the utils like clearHDD, usually found on your HDD manufacturers web site. Returns the HDD to factory settings and usually sorts out any such problems.
I have had problems with HDD before, usually corrupted File Allocation... give it ago, you\'ve got nothing to lose

[CLUBTURBO]

check for a floppy disk and remove it, reboot