Its an old Gateway... P3 1.0 GHz 384 MB PC 133 RAM.

Keeping getting an intermittent Invalid Boot Disk error. Initially thought it was a corrupted OS install so I did a reinstall of XP. Still got it, thought maybe XP wasn't happy with the hardware so I reverted to 98. It gives me the error every so often. Right now I am running a thorough scan disk on the system in the hope that maybe its a bad sector on the hdd. 98 worked on it eons back and since then nothing has been added or removed. I know I am not screwing up the OS install because I've only done it a million times successfully.

Anyone got any other thoughts?

 

could be your floppy drive going bad.. what is set up as your first boot device in your bios?

 

yup scan disk and defrag it... if it still does it say good night to your HD

 

I pulled the floppy drive out changed bios so it wouldn't look for a floppy drive and still got the same errors. I mean how can there be a drive if I don't have a physical drive installed. Boot order is ok... the usual

1. Floppy
2. Hard Drive
3. CD-ROM

I am praying its not the HDD... :sad:

 

are you getting this error during normal operation or on boot up

 

During boot up... if it happened all the time it would be fine and dandy but its completely random.

 

dunno.. doesn't sound like the HD to me for some reason. see if there is a newer bios version and flash it.

 

Thats a last option, right now I am running a thorough scan. My question is why would it suddenly one day decide to act up after a format and fresh OS install.

 

master boot record could be messed up, sometimes even a fresh install doesnt fix that, u have to do it manually.

 

Hmm did a fdisk /mbr and it returned to the command prompt. As far as my knowledge base went that was what it was meant to do.

Well I know the 20 gig on my secondary pc is good. I might format that and install that on this machine to see what it does. Or I could format the 40 gig on the old Gateway and try to install it on my secondary to see if it does the same thing.

Damn its gonna be another long night after I get back from work.