I'm having some problems with a computer a friend gave me. It's a pionex system with a 500mhz celeron and a toshiba dvd-rom. It has an 8 gig hard drive so I figured it'd be a good system to rip dvds to vcds on. When I got it, it had a lot of crap on it so I formatted the HD and reinstalled windows. When I booted back up I reinstalled all the drivers except i had problems with the video card. I e-mailed pionex and they sent me the proper driver. When i rebooted it gave me the "Invalid system disk message" except there was no disk in the A: drive at all! It keeps giving me the message and I even tried putting in a system disk like a windows restore and it still says it's invalid. Any suggestions on what to do would be appreciated.

Can you boot up with a bootdisk? Check the BIOS Setup screen to see if the boot sequence C: then A: is selected.

It won't recognize system disks. If someone could help me format my HD when it's like this or any other suggestions will be appreciated.

Did you check the BIOS Setup screen to see if A: is included in the boot up sequence? This is a MUST for formatting the HD and installing the OS, unless you want to boot up from the CD drive but you still have to go to the BIOS Setup to change the boot up option anyway.

for some reason my bios is pw protected.............help

Contact your friend to see what the pw is.

Some motherboards let you clear the password & BIOS settings by removing the BIOS battery. Some let you clear them by a jumper. FYI.

I cleared the PW by removing the battery so atleast i have access to the BIOS now. The boot sequence is good and i even disabled the A drive. So i rebooted only to find it to say "Invalid system disk, replace then hit any key" ! I know it's not scanning the floppy drive b/c the light doesn't come on and according to the BIOS it doesn't exsist! So I'm guessing it's on my primary HD. So I disabled it and it said "Boot failure, insert system disk and hit enter to continue". Only i can't do that b/c i have neither hard nor floppy drive to do it on. I would just like to format my HD and want to know if that's possible to do through BIOS.

OK, go back to the BIOS setup screen & enable bootup from A:.

Get a bootdisk here (www.bootdisk.com). Create a boot diskette from the file you download. Insert it into drie A: then reboot the computer. If the computer can start with the bootdisk in A:, format the C: drive from A:.

If the system can't be booted up from A:, you'll need to go back to the BIOS setup screen and change the bootup option to the CD drive then boot the system up with your Windows CD to format C:.

One more thing, you can create a startup disk (bootdisk) from the system your using now. Go to Add/Remove Programs and click on Startup Disk tab.

thanks so much. I'm currently ripping Fight Club from DVD to (S)VCD!! thanks again