home Fix label Computers label_important Desktop PCs

SOS! MY COMPUTER WONT BOOT, I HAVE NO BOOT DISK?

IVE GOT WINDOWS XP HOME EDITION..

AT FIIRST THE COMP FROZE, NOW IT WONT TURN ON...IT WILL GO ONTO JUST B4 WINDOWS LOADING PAGE,AFTER THAT IS ASKS FOR 2.INVALID SYSTEM DISK..REPLACE DISK THEN PRESS ANY KEY" I NEED HELP... HOPE I CAN RETIEVE ALL MY PICS ON THERE, I HAVE HUNDREDS OF EM...ALL OF KIDS. THEY ON MY PICTURES...NOT ON HARD DRIVE,WHAT SHOULD I DO, SOMEBODY HELP ME....APPRECIATE ANY HELP...I CANT ACCESS F8 TO BOOT THROUGH THERE///SOS

KNIGHT, July 2004

home Fix label Computers label_important Desktop PCsdone

yes its broke.

colin, August 2010

The best way to get round it is to go into the bios and tell it to boot from cd. And just use you xp disc in the cd rom drive
and it will boot from that.

lee, April 2006

As a last resort, remove the hard drive, get a friend to put it in their machine as a slave and they should be able to access this as a folder and retrieve your photo's. I have done similar for friends to retrieve important data before they format. It can become a little technical and recovery sortware may be needed, so try to choose someone with a little know-how. Hope this helps and I am in time to save your Stuff!!I would back them up regularly onto cd or dvd anyway.

Smiling Carcass, August 2005

There are three main reasons that this message will occur:
1) You have a floppy disk in your drive - this can be solved by hitting a key which skips the machine from trying to load the floppy disk or remove the disk.
2) Windows has corrupted - This means that you will have to format the drive and reinstall Windows. If you have a recovery disk, this should format the machine for you and reinstall but you will lose everything on the machine.
3) The hard drive is corrupt - Sometimes running scandisk off of a boot disk will fix bad sectors and get your machine running, if that fails a format might fix it. If not then your hard drive is off to silicon heaven and you will have to buy a new one.

It is one of the error messages that you really do not want to see unless there is a floppy in the drive.

Vang, July 2004

Go to www.bootdisk.com - from this site you can download boot image programs which when run will automatically create your boot disks.

Suki, July 2004

If you have a friend with XP get them to make you a boot up disc then use that .. a friend keeps getting that on windows 98SE but just hits the enter key & it then loads ok for her.
Hope this was of some help to you

mick, July 2004