Has my notebook been killed?

[Bruce Fielding]

I lent my cute little Sharp A280 PentII notebook to a 'mate'. Now it doesn't do anything except read:

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and then press any key.

He claims to have done nothing to it.

I've tried booting from a number of different OS floppies, changing the boot order, trying to get it to read a USB CD and a PCMCIA CD (it doesn't have one built in). Tried to get as far as a C: promt or even an A: promt, all to no avail - I never get any further than the message above. There's nothing in the setup BIOS that seems to be of use either.

I think he's killed it. What do you think? Shall I beat him to a pulp or is his saviour out there?

[marlboro]

Sounds like the HDD is corrupt, but I guess you knew that.

Within the BIOS you should have a set defaults option, this must be worth a try.

What OS was it running? Do you have the original setup disks?

[annodomini2]

get a boot floppy, you should be able to access the hardrive if the partition is stable, otherwise unless the data on there is extremely valuble. you've lost your data and you'll have to re-setup the disk and operating system.

[Bruce Fielding]

Bruce Fielding said:

I've tried booting from a number of different OS floppies... Tried to get as far as a C: promt or even an A: promt, all to no avail - I never get any further than the message above.

It doesn't boot from the floppy drive, Andy. I can't get it to do ANYTHING other than display that stupid message! Even when I disable every other boot device except the floppy in the BIOS.

Help!

[tvrgit]

what operating system is installed?

if windows 9* it should boot into safe mode or dos.

if win2000 or xp you can put the installation cd in and boot to the recovery console

either way, you should be able to get in and do a "chkdsk /r" which should repair hard disk problems with minimal data loss.