invalid system disk and more!

Hi. ok, simple, I've partitioned my hard drive. One main partition thats all.. no extended partitions. Formatted the drive afterwards. CMOS is recognizing the hard drive as primary master, my cd as secondary master, no problems. First boot is setup as floppy, second as primary master : IDE 0, which is the user drive on my cmos. Anyway.. ME installs, the desktop is displayed. Now.. when I shut it down.. it won't reboot, it says that I have an invalid system disk.
Here's the funny thing, even before I try installing the Windows ME, and the drive is formatted and partition set. Shouldn't the c: prompt come up automatically on reboot? Well it doesn't, invalid system disk, but I can install Windows ME on it. and... afterwards, when I use a startup disk to access my c drive.. and take a directory of it.. it displays the content with some "wingding" characters.. instead of "windows" directory.. etc. But when I do a chkdsk for viruses on the c drive, I get 655,360 bytes memory.. so there is no virus that would cause an invalid sys disk. Can anyone help? Much appreciated.
Frank

1. RE: invalid system disk and more!
lbyard Mar-20-02 01:50 PM
In response to message 0

>But when I do a chkdsk for viruses on the c drive, I get 655,360 bytes memory.. so there is no virus that would cause an invalid sys disk.
I don’t believe that is true for all viruses. I would definitely do a virus scan with a good DOS scanner such as McAfee.
>it displays the content with some "wingding" characters
Corrupted directory… Sign of bad spots on the drive (or a virus, or memory problems)… Suggest doing surface scan with scandisk from the DOS prompt or during the Win Me install. Or running 3rd-party scan such as Western Digitals Lifeguard tools it you have a WD drive.
Try fdisk /mbr after removing partitions. Don’t use that flag with a drive with data that has not been backed-up (http://duxcw.com/digest/guides/hd/rules.htm). Larry