I recently messed with my hard drive in another computer and now it won’t boot. It puts up the whole Invalid System Disk Warning and wont boot past that. I’m pretty sure the problem lies in the fact that im missing COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS, DOS.COM and whatever important boot files are needed. I have a boot disk with them on there, question is, how do i replace the missing files?? Thanks!
You need to provide more detail than that. Like the name and version of the operating system, and whether the data looks intact when you boot it up from the floppy.
Boot from the disk. Type:
copy command.com c:
copy io.sys c:
copy dos.com c:
Alternately, I believe the command “sys c:” will put command.com and io.sys on C: automatically, but I’m not sure about dos.com. Of course, if this isn’t the C drive (the primary master), change the letter accordingly.
I put in the boot disk and at did “A:\sys c:”. It copied all the files fine. When i restarted it showed the Win98 screen and then flashed out the Windows 98 Copyright Microsoft…with the C prompt. Where do i get dos.com so i can load it onto the C drive?
Your “messing” apparently messed up your win boot files as well or it would have re-started after re-applying “sys”. Re-install windows.
I agree with astro.
Yeah, what i tried was copying everything from her HD to a folder on my HD. I reformated her computer and installed what i needed on it and when i was done reformatted and dumped what i thought was everything that was originally on it back onto the C drive. There’s no way of just repairing those files through the win98 setup disk?? I mean theres nothing important to be lost but it would be much simpler. If not ill do that. Thanks guys.
Invalid system disk means that the disk is missing a valid boot sector. This is a special 512 byte sector that the operating system loads and executes to start the operating system. It’s not a file. Part of the sys command is to write this boot sector out to the hard drive.
You need to do a backup and restore to properly save and restore system files. Copying a folder like that won’t work. If you are a true computer weenie you can copy certain types of folders and applications like that, but if you don’t know what you are doing you can easily miss things, as you’ve discovered the hard way.
“done reformatted and dumped what i thought was everything that was originally on it
back onto the C drive.”
yeah, if you did that you overwrote the system files most likely.
I would try to Run setup from the dos prompt, C:>setup so it reinstalls w98.