i have a p4 1.7 on intel 845hv board 256ram,last week it gave up the ghost,i managed to format the hd now when it boots, with xp disk in cd,it say's invalid system disk replace the disk and press any key,on doing so it reports, boot failure:systen halted.in the bios it is set to boot from cd

What do you mean by "gave up the ghost" i.e. Motherboard? Hard Drive? etc. What happened?

If the BIOS is set to boot the CD prior to the hard drive ... are you sure that the CD drive is recognized and functioning?

You could try the 6 floppy boot setup:

How to obtain Windows XP Setup boot disks
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310994



.

i now have a disk from pc beginner that boots up on start and has afew utilities on it i have done a chkdsk and got file allocation bad, now i am trying scandisk but it is taking hours is this right?

chkdsk is basically scandisk for XP. scandisk will probably not run.

Did you have chkdsk set to fix? chkdsk /f

yes i had chkdsk/f i have noticed on boot the ram check is slow i can see the amount going up in multiples of 6,10,15 ram is this normal?i tried another route, i have managed to get the floppy working, and with a win 98 disk i have got to the win 98 set up page and then get an error, set up cannot find a high memory manager and cannot continue, unable to control a20 line xms driver not installed, i am now in a blue screen scrolling with this message and a beeping from the computer and cd drive green light flashing.

Sounds like you are losing your chipset. The A20 line handler is built into the chipset for Extended memory. 98 will not run without XMS functions.

This 6,10,15 count your refer to, is this in bytes or K-bytes or M-bytes? Also, how slow are you counting? Is this in seconds, minutes, hours?

the count is in m-bytes and it takes about 25 seconds to get to 256
i am contemplating buying a motherboard i have seen on ebay,i will post when i get it.

Hello again longroughrider,

"... i managed to format the hd..."

What did you use to format the hard disk? Did you format as FAT32 or NTFS?

"... i now have a disk from pc beginner that boots up on start and has afew utilities on it ..."

Is this what you used to format the hard disk? Do you have a link for this so we may see what it is?

Per jephree: "If the BIOS is set to boot the CD prior to the hard drive ... are you sure that the CD drive is recognized and functioning?"

Which leads to;

"... now when it boots, with xp disk in cd,it say's invalid system disk replace the disk..."

because this sounds as though it's sourcing the formatted (blank) hard disk. and not finding the boot files. If it is indeed sourcing the CDROM prior to the hard disk, the CDROM (or your CD) isn't functioning (properly) and it's going to the next device in the boot sequence.

If you downloaded and made the 98SE bootdisk from my webspace, a way to test the CDROM is to boot with the bootdisk (it'll default to CDROM support) and try a dir/a/o x:\ (where x: is the CDROM device letter assigned by the bootdisk). If you get a listing, the drive, drive jumper, cable, and controller are OK.

"... with a win 98 disk i have got to the win 98 set up page..."

What page, where?

Is the Fast Gate A20 Option set to Enabled in the bios?

Please answer the questions presented (by everyone). Now you've got three of us coming at you. ;>) (I'll back out now though, just wanted to put in my 2 cents worth, but please provide the info to these guys.)

hi dan, here we go again,the hard drive is fat32,the cd is from www.pcbeginner.com and i formated the h/d with it.with the cd in the drive on boot the cd runs and i get a list of utilities to run, having formated the h/d i then went for install xp, i put cd in but it would not run i just got an r:\ when i typed dir it listed all the xp files on the cd, when i typed in setup.exe, i got, this programme cannot run in dos mode.so i tried the same thing with win98 cd, and as the cd drive was reading the disk,(green light flashing,drive noise)i got a(blue win98 set up) rolling screen with,set up cannot find a high memory manager and cannot continue,unable to control line a20, xms driver not installed, extented memory manager not installed.
Is the Fast Gate A20 Option set to Enabled in the bios?, i,m afraid i could not find that anywhere in the bios.

dan, i slaved my h/d from the recently fixed computer with win98 installed and got this message on boot up,
windows xms driver version 3.5
extented memory specification (xms)version 3.0
error unable to control a20 line
xms driver not installed
c:\>mode con codepage=(850)c:\windows\command\ega.cpi)
mode prepare code page function completed
c:\>mode con codepage select=850
mode prepare code page function completed
c:\>key b uk, ,c:\windows\ccommand\keyboard.sys
c:\>
himem.sys is missing
make sure that the file is in your windows directory
c:\>