Assuming it is an IDE drive.
 
First, make sure your CMOS is setup to boot from the hard drive first (or
make sure you don't have any CDs or floppy disks in the drives).
 
Second, check to see if your PC is detecting your hard drive.  If it is a
newer PC and the drive is setup to autodetect then just after the memory
count it should tell you what drives it found.
 
Third, if the drive is detected and booting as the first device, try booting
from a floppy instead.  See if you can mount the filesystems.  If you can
_IMMEDIATELY_ pull everything off the disk you need.  Run fdisk see if your
partitions are still correct.  If you are using lilo to boot run lilo to
refresh the boot loader on the MBR.  If that doesn't work, as an extreme
measure erase and reinstall.  Last measure, buy a new HD and reinstall.
 
Finally, I've seen a PC eat hard drives.  I've seen IDE CD-Roms go bad
stopping a hard drive boot and causing intermittent, and sometimes serious,
HD errors.  I had one PC that I finally threw out because it was slowly
trashing hard drives.  I suspected either the motherboard or the power
supply.  It was just cheaper and faster to buy a new PC than figure out the
problem.
 
Any other ideas?
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: Steve Liles [mailto:sliles@bigpond.net.au]
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2003 7:45 PM
To: kclug@kclug.org
Subject: Invalid system disk

A friend of mine had a problem trying to boot from his hard drive.  I
thought it might be a CMOS issue so I played around with his CMOS
settings...it still didn't think his C drive was bootable...so I tried the
disk in one of my linux systems.  No difference.  However, now I can't boot
up from my linux box..during the boot process I'm told that I have an
"invalid system disk" and it can't boot.   Am I stupid or what?  Any ideas?
 
Steve

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