I'm getting an error message "Non system disk"- press any key

T

tbfoto

New Member
I recently installed a new harddrive in my desktop and installed the operating system from a set of disks that I ordered from HP. The computer has been up and running for about 2 months now and all seems to be running fine except that whenever I reboot I get a blank screen now that says "Non system disk....press any key". When I press a key it will then continue to reboot and start everything up and all is well. If I do not press a key it will just sit there blank until I do. How do I change things so that I dont get that error message? I still have the old hard drive in my computer but I want to reformat that drive and use it for storage. Is the startup using that old drive?

Thanks,
tbfoto
 
XP is the likely version of Windows there. That error points a problem now being seen with the boot information being somewhat unreadable or problem like a bad data cable for the drive where the drive isn't being detected like it should.

Booting up with the recovery disk to press the R key option for recovery console you can try the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands there to see all this clears up. You simply type those at the dos type command prompt and press enter then Y for yes. Typing exit will then see the system restart after you follow that by pressing the enter ksy again to exit the recovery console itself.

If that still fails to see results then you would have to start looking at the cable or drive itself as being the problem. Since the drive has worked well otherwise for two months that points more at a corrupted boot record with some information lost rather then a problem drive.
 
Besides a weak battery resetting factory defaults like cd rom or floppy as the first boot device finding no disk in drive would be typical there. With only the hard drive being pointed to the option where an XP cd is available and used for installing XP would be seeing the recovery console installed as a boot option. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654

Since you used a set of preprepared floppies from HP you won't have that option there as well as not being able to boot from an XP installation disk to the recover console. The other thought despite being only two months old would be a bad drive being realized.

Invalid / Non System Disk error.

Issue:

Invalid / Non System Disk error.
Cause:

Solution:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000229.htm

An alternative that works while Windows is running however for seeing the mbr rewritten is the MBRfix tool found at http://www.ambience.sk/fdisk-master-boot-record-windows-linux-lilo-fixmbr.php
 
Ok....the problem turned out to be that since I had to reload windows from the set of restore disks it changed the boot device priority setting in order to load windows from the disk drive. So......I then needed to go into the bios and change the boot device priority setting back so that my hard drive was the #1 priority device.

tbfoto
 
People ask why I am dual booting but simply seeing XP and Vista here on two separate drives as stand alone OSs and use the F8 key to bring up the boot device menu at post. If Windows needs to be reinstalled the drive(Vista presently) is already set as default.

When making that first restart you otherwise always have to remember to go back into the bios all over again like you found out there. At least that was a quick fix and no hardware problem being seen.
 
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