Dianne,

From what you are describing, the message you are getting means that the A
drive is trying to read a floppy that is not in the drive. Assuming that
your boot order in BIOS is set up to read A, CD, then HDD, something is
causing the A drive the think there is a disk in it when there isn't,
therefore I would guess that there is something jammed in there making the
drive think there is a diskette in the drive. Since the machine is looking
for a boot record, and can find none, you get the prompt.

If possible, try another floppy drive, they are only $10-12 at most PC
stores, and many of them will just have older ones lying around that they
will just give you.

I am skeptical of a MB failure, this sounds like something mechanical, but
I'm no technician. I had this issue when my daughter left a game floppy in
the drive and shut it off. The next time the PC is fired up with the disk in
the drive the BIOS tells the drive to search for a boot record on the A
drive. The game disk had no boot record and presto, "Invalid System Disk".
I finally changed the boot order in the BIOS to boot from "IDE-0" first.
Problem solved!

HTH, good luck...

Dean Kiley

BTW... I used Win ME for several years and now it is on my daughter's
machine. Many issues have disappeared since I upgraded my machine to WXP and
now the daughter has to deal with the issues. Granted, WXP is pricey, I
thought it was worth it. Most PC stores will sell you WXP at a greatly
reduced price if you buy another Microsoft supported item, such as memory or
a drive.

> -----Original Message-----
> Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] WIN Me invalid system disk
>
> Once again, I want to thank all you guys for your time and effort on this
> one....
> Here is what I tried:  I disconnected all the connectors to all the drives
> and rebooted.  I got the message "Invalid boot diskette, Insert Boot
> diskette in A:".  Then I went to the BIOS and made sure all the drives
> were
> not being indicated, and changed the A drive to "none installed", when I
> rebooted I got "Invalid Boot disk, Insert Boot diskette in A:".  I
> reconnected and tried another data cable, it made no difference.  The
> light
> on the a drive is on all the time when it is connected.
> OK, if I concede that it IS the Mother board, and therefore the computer
> itself (an older model anyway-P3, Windows Me, etc.  How can I get the info
> off the hard drive, or have I lost it already?  Will it hurt my computer
> to
> connect this hard drive to it, and try to create a disk of the file info
> on
> it?
> Dianne

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