Hopefully someone can give me some help out there. I recently installed Norton SW 2005 to my Windows 98SE system. (The 2002 Norton was working fine before.) Nothing but crashes and problems since. Now I can't even boot up to windows. "Invalid System Disk", error. Insert disk press any key. This happened after I'd been running norton speed disk and norton disk doctor. Which kept saying run the other over and over again. So I then ran Windows scan disk, rebooted and boom. Nothing. Norton goback still shows up but pressing the space bar says there are no good times to restore the drive. This is an old computer that was given to me and I don't have windows 98SE start up disk (though I'm sure I could borrow one from someone). What I'm worried about is losing my data on my hard drive. Anyone know how I should proceed from here? I've been surfing all around to try to find the answer and now I'm here. Thanks.:sad: (I've actually bought a new computer now with xp on it, and I've tried installing the old drive in the new computer as a slave, but xp doesn't recognize though it does show up in bios, anyway, that's another question of how I'm going to transfer files to the new one, but should probably be asked in the xp forum.)

Hi Chickysue!
Welcome to PC Help Forum!

First of all, there's a poor chance of losing your files, but make sure you do not format the harddrive.
An (easy) way to get your files back is to get your hard drive in another computer, which you tried. Also, transferring the files to the new one will be easy if both harddisks are in the same computer, it goes like copying any files. Does XP comletely fail to recognize the disk? That's pretty strange.
Does your that drive show up in Drive Manager? You can get there right-clicking on 'My Computer', and then click 'Manage'.

Bluefish

It is pretty weird. The bios recognizes the slave drive just fine. And actually, xp also recognizes it, but in a weird way. It is not assigned a drive letter and yet it does appear in disk manager as
"C DRIVE...partion...healthy...active...." When we tried to assign it one, by right clicking it was grayed out, only delete partition was available to us. The other drives (C) & (D) listed there had all options available. We're gonna try it one more time tomorrow evening and any info. anybody out there has for us to try would be great. We already tried changing positions to secondary slave and I know my friend (who's a former IBM tech) tried changing other things like the postions where the drive was physically connected on the cable etc. And changing cable select to whatever, (can you tell I'm not a hardware person?) Anyway, it just feels like we're missing something really simple here, cuz it's there, but not there. Has anyone out there done this before with an older version of windows? Is the problem maybe that there's a win98se op system on the other drive that's listing as active, so xp won't deal with it? :icon_scra Thanks for any help!