On 29 Jan 99, at 8:45, Dave Perry wrote:

> My hard drive crashed big time the other day. I had been working in
> windows trying to get my dial up networking going. I had to reboot at
> one stage but before windows started loading I got the
> message...Invalid system disk, please replace and hit any key. I
> didn't have any disk in A so I suspected something bad had happened.
> My question to the list is can you cause this kind of crash by
> deleting files in Windows. I noticed that I had a list of files below
> the C directory in explorer. I rushed in and deleted them. I did this
> before rebooting. One of the reasons I deleted them is because some
> of them were programmes my son had downloaded and looked suspiously
> like a hackers programme. Once again, can a crash of this magnitude
> be caused by deleting windows files or is this classic virus
> behaviour.

  The clear answer is "maybe".

  IF you had Explorer set to display all files (not its default
setting) and if you told it to go ahead and delete files that were
marked "system" and "read-only", then you could indeed have deleted the
IO.SYS file and its friends needed to boot.  The message, then, could
be coming from the boot-sector code when it can't find those files.


  If that's all the problem is, you can *probably* fix it by finding
another machine running the same OS, and creating a boot diskette with
the SYS.COM utility on it.  You should be able to boot your machine
from the diskette, and use SYS.COM to copy the boot files from the
diskette onto the hard drive.  [So if they don't match the version of
the rest of your system files, anything (not good) could happen.]
  The ideal thing would be to have a startup disk, created under
Settings|Contol Panel|Add/Remove Programs.  But nobody bothers with
that until they've been bitten like this a couple of times....


David G

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