Invalid system disk

[devjoy]

I am putting together a new computer for my husband. His old 486 mobo just died. The motherboard is a TXPro II with on board video. The system will post and is reconizing the 32 mg of 66mhz SDRAM and the IDE auto detect found and correctly identified the hard drive (his old 500 mg hd with all his programs) and the cdrom but it gets to the message Invalid system disk- I have tried changing the boot scequence, but get the same message. It don't hear the hard drive turning nor does the green light come on when I try to boot from a floppy. I know that the floppy cable is plugged in correctly as the plug is keyed and will only fit one way. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Rookie]

I had similar problems with swapping hdd in & out of pent120, and 486 machines. Try turning lba off if the bios will let you. What kind of hdd is the old 500m? if its west dig you may have to use 2 jumpers- see their site if thats the case. Not to insult you but is everything jumpered correctly e.g. master/slave? I'd try getting the bios to detect the hdd with the cd rom out. That may clue you in on which lba, or other bios setting to choose to get the old hdd to be recognized. How old is the bios date?
need more info, hope that helped a little.
Rookie

[devjoy]

Thanks Rookie,
I can now boot to a: with a win boot disk and change to the c: drive. I can read the directory on the c: drive but when I try to get it to bring up windows I get the HYMEM.SYS missing error. Of course, it is not missing. It is there in the windows directory. The hard drive is a Quantum I beleive. I know I can reformat and reinstall windows but I was hoping to avoid that. All the jumpers are ok but I do plan to flash the BIOS when I can get it to running a little better. Any ideas how to get into windows from a floppy boot? Thank you very much for helping. I know that the hard drive is partitioned and has a compressed drive on it but c: is a FAT16 and is not compressed. The OS is Win95a. With the exception of recogizing the cpu as a Cyrix MII 200 instead of 233, the post is correct. I noticed I had the clock multiplier set wrong and will fix that.

[Underclocked]

If you are trying to put that hard drive on a different motherboard without reloading win95, you are in a world of trouble. You will have to reload 95 (unless someone knows a miracle cure /forum/wink.gif )

[Susan]

WIN95 handles motherboard swaps much better than WIN98, IMO.

Need to get into WIN first. Have you tried redetecting the HD in BIOS and selecting the different options for it? Try normal...

[devjoy]

Thanks everyone, I will try all the suggestions, but I will have to put it on hold for a while. We are headed to the beach in the morning for a week. When I get back I we probably need more help. Thanks again.

[Rookie]

my win95A does the same thing if I try to clean boot from a floppy. It was suggested to me on a mailing list I belong to that I copy this line to the config.sys file on the boot disk: device=c:/windows/himem.sys
I tried it but I think it also needs to have the buffers=40 and another line in there.
I'm no dos wizard, but the idea is that himem.sys IS in the path and directory that its supposed to be but without the config.sys line it isnt getting *loaded into memory*
I havent tried it again cause I just got 95B (osr2, the fat32 capable one) with that I can now use 95 on my faster amd box.
Hopefully someone more expirianced in dos will see this post and speak up.
Rookie

[devjoy]

Hello everyone. I'm back from the beach and the computer is now booting easily into Windows with no error messages. It was the BIOS detecting the hard drive as having LBA which it does not. As soon as I turned LBA off and saved the change, it booted beautifully into windows. I think I should run windows setup to be sure that the registry is in order. I have gotten a few invalid page faults in GDI.exe, while trying to start some programs, that I think are caused by registry problems. Does that sound plausable? Thanks for all the help.