I had a virus on my old IDE drive, I used that as an excuse to get a new SATA drive, I connected the new drive with the CD drive, inserted the XP cd and successfully loaded windows. I then loaded Norton antivirus software, updated virus definitions, then hooked up the IDE drives again to rid them of the virus. After all virus are found and quarantined I proceeded to load the windows updates, drivers, etc. Upon rebooting the machine it now gives me Invalid System Disk error and the cd drive is locked up(won't open, no power).

I tried reloading windows again on the SATA drive, same end result, tried loading it on an IDE drive, same thing. Even tried loading it on a spare IDE drive that is freshly formatted get the same thing.

On the last attempt, I did find out that if the windows cd is in the drive, instead of going to invalid system disk it asks to boot from cdrom press any key; if you don't press a key, windows boots up just fine. Once it is booted up, you can remove the cd and it runs fine....until you reboot....then once again, invalid system disk.

The desktop PC was working fine before all this except for the virus. I have changed the boot order of the devices, even to the extent of removing the cdrom from the boot sequence, still no luck.

Any ideas? I have never seen anything like this before.

Rhoady

invalid system disk usually means it can't find a disk to boot too. (not active partition, or mbr is corrupt) It still gave an error when you removed cdrom from the boot list? How many drives do you have currently hooked up?

There are 2 IDE drives, and 1 SATA drive, it only gives the error when the XP disk is not in the CD drive, if the disk is in it asks to boot from cd press any key, if you do not press a key, it boots normally(with no errors), if you press a key it goes to the XP installation routine.

if there is no cd in the drive it should just skip on to boot the HDD. I guess I would next make sure that the motherboard bios is up to date. If that doesn't clear it, update the firmware of your optical drive, then see if that fixes the bug.

With multiple hard drives and especially a mix of IDE and SATA you also need to pay careful attention to the BIOS Hard Drive list.

This lists in what order the hard drives are looked at to boot.

You need to verify your OS drive is set to boot first.

You should see a list of every SATA channel as well as IDE channel. You need to put your boot drive at the top of the list.

The BIOS is not going to scan channels but rather go to the chosen one. If there is no boot drive in the chosen channel you will get your error.

I assume you installed your SATA drivers at the F6 prompt on the SATA drive?

I also assume you verified your motherboard was/is SATA II or else you jumpered the SATA drive back to SATA I ?

I suggest starting over from scratch. Only install the SATA drive and load XP on it.

If you want to wipe it first use Kill Disk. http://www.killdisk.com/

If you get this clear then add your drivers and Windows Updates.

I suggest you NEVER EVER install any Norton software.

If you want to clear those old drives again run Kill Disk on them and start from scratch.

If you want a free Anti Virus use either AVG or Avast!