Invalid System Disk

[Tazman]

This has happened twice to me today. The first time I'm not quite sure if I was doing the same thing as I was the second but it's pretty likely I was. Here goes.

I did a restore on my computer from Norton Ghost. It was just an image with the bare nessesities - Win ME, mobo drivers, card drivers, etc. It also had Partition Magic 6.0 and Norton Systemworks 2002 installed. It did the restore perfectly. When it was done, I popped out the cd and rebooted without any problems.

I did all of the Windoze updates, partitioned the drive into the following partitions:

c: Win ME - 3.5GB
d: Win 2k Server - 3.5GB
e: Win XP Home - 3.5GB
Linux partition 4GB
Linux swap 256MB
Remainder for Data and programs.

That also went ok. I didn't install anything on the partitions.
(o/s's, etc.) I booted back to ME after partition magic did it's thing and started my tweaks. Among one of the is I set the swap file to the slave drive (Maxtor 60GB) for a minimum of 160mb to max at 512mb.

I then started running through Norton Systemworks to make sure everything was going good with ME before moving on to 2K. I ran Disk Optimization and it said something about optimizing the swap file with it and to reboot - I "yes"ed it and rebooted.

Invalid system disk. As I said, I did the same twice today . I'm suspecting either the swap file tweak (a new one to me but it worked fine 'til I ran Norton Speed Disk / Optimization) or it's Norton speed disk.

Here's the specs:
Asus A7A266
XP 1700
512MB PC2100 DDR Ram
40GB Maxtor 7200 rpm master
60GB Maxtor
20x10x40 Lite On CDRW
16x Sony DVD,
etc.

Any suggestions? Both drives are about 5 months old and I have always had great luck with the Maxtor drives.

If I boot to a 98 boot disk, I see everything on C drive. I'm guessing something happened to Windows. I didn't have a third party boot proggie going (Boot Magic). Anyway to restore the boot record / swap file. I 'm lost on this one.

Thanks in advance,

Mike

[Rancher70818]

Could be norton got into your master boot record! With as many os's you have I would use pqboot magic (i do on my 3) this way even if nort skeerus ya there is recovery to mbr. How now? Have you tried mbr /restore at the prompt? Don't think you can do it from win98 startup, try with your pqmagic two startup disks.

[zen]

Go to www.symantec.com to get the fix. Did the same thing myself.

Norton utility stuff has a mind of it's own. Some of it works great most of the time, but then on occasion really messes up. Annoying. Luckily it doesn't sound like a terminal problem though.

I would definitely second the suggsetion to use a boot loader. I think boot magic comes with PM 6.0, doesn't it? Use it to make life easier if you don't already (I think maybe you already realise that, don't you ).
Hope you fix it easy now.
Cheers
Mick

[Tazman]

Mick -

I re-installed with the Ghost image quite a few times and kept crashing on the Norton thingy. I was trying to see if it was actually Norton or a "tweak" that I did before I Ghosted it some months ago.

After a many daze messin' with it in my off time, I wiped out all of the partitions and formatted . I just finished installing the Win ME partition and all of the proggies. I've run Norton Speed disk / Norton Optimization / eveything that I think I was doing before and can't seem to crash it .

I was more curious if it was me, ME or Norton. I guess it was me (as in ME as they are my initials ). Everything is checking out fine. Matter of fact............too fine. I usually test a system and can crash it one way or another before too long - dunno? I even o/c'ed my GeForce 3 Ti200 today for a first (gotta 6898 in 3D Mark 2001) - still too stable .

I guess I had something wrong when I Ghosted it the first time. Since I have never, ever made any mistakes before I wasn't expecting a Ghost image to be bad . A few more daze and a few more o/s installs and I'll be able re-Ghost this as perrrrfect!

Mike