ComputerBB

I recently was rebooting my hard drive with the disks from the manufacturer and right at 74% it stopped and gave me a Read Error. Now my computer whenever I turn it on says Invalid System Disk,Please Insert now. I keep trying to do it over and over again and it stops at that exact same spot. The disk seems ok,small bits of scratching though. Should I take it to a repairman? My warranty has long since run out. Please help right now my computer is a shell and I am afraid my folks will find out and kill me. Signed A Very Desperate Person

Should I try getting one of those Cd cleaning machines?

You can try cleaning you're CD (the disk) with some window cleaner and a soft paper towel, but it sounds like you have a damaged disk to me. Try the reinstall one more time, with some luck you may get past the bad spot. If not see if you can borrow a O/S disk, if not you may have to get a new O/S disk and go from there. Good Luck.

I tried and tried over and over again with no sucess. Do you mean I need to buy a new Operating System?

If you keep hanging at the same point you install disk is damaged. You may be able to get replacements from the manufacture. But the quickes way looks to be getting a new copy of XP and install it.

I dont have XP I have ME but I was looking at some site that said you could download Windows ME start disks but im not sure how reliable that was.

Anything free may come at a price

ok, heres my two cents. Windows installs on a dos partition in whatever format that OS uses. Windows 98 uses fat 32, XP uses NTFS. I dont know what ME uses. If any portion of that partition is damaged or being used by a previous install, the install will stop. I would try creating a seperate partition on the drive and attempt to install Windows on that. Assuming the partition is big enough and still could not install, I would then seriously consider new software. Hope this helps.

Looks like ME is FAT 32, if you move up to XP check you're computer specs. make sure you have enough ram and processor speed. Check here first http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -us;295322 ME links that may help. http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... us;q268891 http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... us;q272159