invalid system disk..

[nugget]

Hi everyone,
I have a compaq armada 1592dt(portable) and i cannot seem to get the thing to boot up. It gives me a similar prompt to as if i had a floppy in the drive saying that it is an invalid system disk. It does this even though there is no floppy in it. I ran fdisk (through a win95 start disk)and it then says that there are no fixed disks present!!!
I cant seem to get into the bios to run the hdd detector either. I am pretty sure that the keypress for this machine is f10 so no luck there either.
Any help that anyone could give me would be much appreciated. Thankyou
Dave

 

[PAndersen]

Maybe you will find some help at :

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q128/7/30.ASP

 

[paulwood]

Have you recently reformatted the hard disk? If so you may have destroyed a hidden partition Compaq put on their hard disks which is what is accessed by the F10 keypress. Even if you haven't it is likely that this partition has got damaged. You can probably get a patch from the Compaq site to reinstate the partition.

Good Luck

 

[edfair]

If like desktops you get an executable that creates two floppies, setup and diagnostic. Setup has a section for managing the diagnostic partition.
The active partition should boot without the diagnostic stuff being available. You could try fdisk /mbr with the proper backup disk. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[djsutch]

I had the same problem and I don't know what caused it. I also have a compaq, for one compaq uses f10 to access bios, but the bios for compaq stinks. Eventually I had to run the western digital data life guard tools, and run a low level format; you can download the tools from their website if you don't have the floppy.