After i format and reload a hdd on a Dell Dimension 8100 (older dimensions) when it gets to the point after formatting and loading the files, and restarts to load into windows to finish up the rest of the installation it always comes up "Invaild System Disk, Replace the disk, and then press any key"

1. There isnt a floppy driver and i also have it turned off in bios.

2. The configuration is IDE HDD is on IDE1 on the MB Master and CD-ROM is IDE2 Master on MB.

3. I have reloaded with several disk, cd-roms, and hdd's.

4. I have set the hdd's jumpers to Cable Select and tried it and Master and tried it.

5. I even have tried with the hdd on the IDE2 and CD-ROM on IDE1 lol.

Any ideas would be awsome weither their common since or not lol i must have overlooked something or mabe the mb isnt reading the hdd's right? I have tried Fujitsu's and Seagates 10gb.

Any other device between CDRom and HDD in boot order in Bios ? Like USB or multi card readers ?

Other than that, I'd wipe the first cylinder of the disk with Ranish Partition Manager and retry.

yea there isnt any other devices listed in the boot order but the hdd and cd-rom.

i'll look into that partition utility today thanks

What method are you using to do the format and reload?

If you're using the Dell CDs for restoring/installing the system, you may have come up against something preset here.

The invalid system disk sounds like unrecognised stuff in the first disk block, so the BIOS software pulls out the message to show it has no way of going further.

That's a message from the bootloader on the HDD, wipe the HDD, repartition, reformat and try again.

If that doesn´t help you need to integrate the SATA driver into your CD with nLite for example. It´s a big problem when you push F6 at startup and it asks for a floppy and you can´t hook up one (USB doesn´t work I saw, but please fill me in if I´m wrong).