invalid system disk

[treesha]

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.
tried fdisk /mbr. still problem
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.

 

[Woodman]

Wooo.

Well my suggestion is to copy everything you don't want to lose, onto a spare drive, and then completely re-fdisk/format the thing. FDisk as in deleting all partitions & logical drives, etc.. then re-doing them again.

If possible, you might also want to do a low-level format as well afterwards, instead of normal high-level formatting.

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Do not spit.

 

[treesha]

Hi,
Thanks for the response. How would I copy everything I don't want to lose, onto a spare drive ?
I am not familiar with how this might be done.
Do you mean a spare hd, as in install another one ?
I assume I would have to use dos which I dont know ?
Any help appreciated. Treesha

 

[Woodman]

It's simple, get another system, place this funky drive of yours inside (as a Slave, or as a secondary non-booting device), then copy & paste in Windows onto the older drive. You can use your old system for this easily.

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Do not spit.

 

[lunitic]

tried sys c, got "parameter format not correct - c"

The format of the sys command is:
sys c:
(don't forget the semicolon; your telling the sys command you want to transfer the system to the c: drive.)

Anyway, I'd say your file system is hopelessly messed up. That's bad. I hope you made a backup recently.
By hooking up your drive as secundary drive to another system you should be able to retrieve most of your files; however some of your files may have been mixed up, and some of the folders your files are in may also be mixed up. Those files can re retrieved with some undelete-software (which are usually not free, and demo-versions often allow you only to undelete files smaller than 64kB)

Since your file system is messed up you have to reinstall windows, and you also have to reformat the drive before installing Windows. Sorry

 

[grafixmonkey]

If your drive is dead, don't worry you can still recover the information off of it - look up a program called R-Studio from a company called R-Labs. It was able to get almost all of my data off of a 100GB western digital drive that head-crashed on me. (you'd need a new hard drive, with windows installed on it.)

Sorry to say, but if there's no way a virus messed up your drive, then it sounds a lot like the head crash I got on my western digital. System just hung up during a transfer for no reason, then when it rebooted Windows could not see that hard drive anymore.