Hi, I have a Toshiba A45 laptop and am trying to do a new installation on a new disk.

Bio is set to CD/HD and LAN is disabled.

I have three authorized disks: XP Pro full sp2/XP Home Toshiba recovery and Vista Toshiba recovery.

None of these disks do more but bring up the "invalid system disk" error.

The HD I'm installing was tested attached via USB in an enclosure to a friend's computer and worked fine. However, I screwed around with it, including doing DOD-strength erasing.

The CD drive appears to be behaving normally.

Any ideas of what I can try next? Thanks in advance!

Is this new disk formatted?

Are you tapping the "Right-Arrow" during the bootup (Toshiba splash screen) to move the curser from the Hard Disk to the Optical Drive?
(The OS "setup" will format the drive for you.)

Originally Posted by Digerati

Is this new disk formatted?

It was a friend's new drive with a little data on it he wanted erased, so we initially popped the drive in an enclosure and a USB port, then ran copy/wipe on it. I thought we formatted it fine thereafter in Windows Disc Management, but now when I pop it back in the enclosure, his computer doesn't recognize it as being attached via USB.

Dupe post.

Originally Posted by Dan Penny

Are you tapping the "Right-Arrow" during the bootup (Toshiba splash screen) to move the curser from the Hard Disk to the Optical Drive?
(The OS "setup" will format the drive for you.)

When I tap the cursor to move it to the op driver, nothing highlights. So I just tapped it once to move it one slot from hd to cd drive, per your suggestion. (It is set in BIOS to boot from cd drive.) Nothing different occurs. Basically the cd drive is operational and you can hear it chugging away for about a minute or two before it returns the error message.

"I thought we formatted it fine"

Did you format it as FAT32?

Originally Posted by Dan Penny

"I thought we formatted it fine"

Did you format it as FAT32?

God, it was late/early in the AM when we did it and I'm not sure. (We were doing a marathon with a lot of parts.) I'm thinking it was NTFS, but I'm not sure actually if we did format it at all. Currently, when in the enclosure, it's not recognized in Win Explorer or in Disk Management. Before, with the drive I'm tossing, when that one wasn't recognized by Explorer, I was still able to pull it up in DM and assign a drive letter to it.

I've recently worked on a Toshiba A10. The client had the factory install disks for XP specifically for the machine. (Turned out the hard disk was bad.)

These CD's format the drive as FAT32 (Ghost program), load basic elements, _then_ convert the hard disk to NTFS, and finish the OS install.

Originally Posted by Dan Penny

I've recently worked on a Toshiba A10. The client had the factory install disks for XP specifically for the machine. (Turned out the hard disk was bad.)

These CD's format the drive as FAT32 (Ghost program), load basic elements, _then_ convert the hard disk to NTFS, and finish the OS install.

I doubt the drive here is bad. It was running great and sounding/feeling great prior to the copy/write. I have the factory recovery disks that are given with purchase of the A45 and other Windows authorized versions, as mentioned above.

What about the MBR? Did I destroy it in erasing the disk with the DOD-strength option of copy/wipe?