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General discussion

invalid system disk

Feb 1, 2004 11:10AM PST

Here is what happened.
On email, no attachment involved, it froze or something so I had to reboot.
upon boot, error message, drive (or disk) I/O error, replace it, press any key.
no success, no disks in any drives
used win me startup, ran scandisk found 211 invalid drive entries 142 directory entries, FAT chains were truncated
144 invalid directory entries, and some errors were not fixed.ran surface check, no errore
ran scanreg/restore, to a few days earlier

messed around with hardware stuff, unplugging and switching drives with an old computer i have.
no change

ran scandisk again found 615 invalid directories were removed
11 directory entries fat chains were truncated
25 inval;id directories were corrected
17 lost directories were reinstated
10,392 lost clusters were saved as files di

did not fx all errors- long filename needs scandisk for windows.
cant get to that right now

now i ger a new error
invalid system disk, replace. press any key

back to the help on win me startup -
tried e:setup.exe

looked on net for troubleshooting ideas -
tried entering fdisk to see if it found the hard disk, it did. this troublshooting thing from the net said to then type sys c and it should return a message that says "system transferred", but it did not. I got a message "parameter format not correct". it says if you get a bad command or filename message, that you need to obtain a bootable floopy with the file sys.com on it.

entering setup at the beginning does show the hard drive.
I just used a maxtor utility to check if the drive is ok and it passed all the tests I did. So if that is true, the drive is ok.
so far nothing has gotten the new error message to stop.
tried sys c, got "parameter format not correct - c"
tried to recopy files using some dos commands from online, it copied 1 file, then copied one more file, but the same invalid system disk.
tried using c:
dir /s /a

found
31,999 files
3,736 directories
including some orignial wav files I dont want to lose.
i do not want to reinstall win unless i have exhausted all ideas cause of the work involved and some creative issues.
any help MUCH appreciated as I dont know what else to try.

Discussion is locked

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I am not sure....
Feb 1, 2004 11:29AM PST

if you are using a colon with the SYS C: command.

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Re:invalid system disk
Feb 1, 2004 10:36PM PST

It is extremely unlikely you can recover your system after all the errors it found and corrected, you may have already lost all your data because of running the repairs you ran.

Your only real hope of getting your data off is to get another drive, install Windows on it and then put this drive in as the second drive and try and copy off the files that have not been damaged.