Hi, we had a thunderstorm (it was far away) and the power flickered. Just flickered. My mother's computer (a Compaq Presario 5240 running Win98) rebooted itself and when it came back up, it said "invalid system disk, please insert system disk and hit any key". Here's what I have done:

I tried making the slave HD the master to see if it would boot. I thought the 2nd HD had an OS on it because it used to be my old HD. I think it was recently reformatted, so I'm thinking it no longer has the OS.

I tried creating a Win98 boot disk, but when I tried it the diskette got stuck in the drive. (had to take it apart to get it out! annoying!)
So I don't even know if the A: is working correctly anymore either.
(there is no disk in any of the drives btw)

I tried rebooting into the BIOS, but now when the computer boots up I'm getting a FF 301 keyboard error! ARGH! It *was* working and now it's not. I plugged in my keyboard and it works fine. *phew* However, I still could not get into the BIOS to see if it was trying to boot off the A: or cd-rom drives.

(part 2)
All I want is my 3 yr old's pictures off the harddrive. I would like to be able to fix the computer but if not, I would at least like the pictures off the HD. If I slave the HD to my computer (running WinXP) do you think I can get them off?
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Sounds like the computer wasn't hooked up to a surge protector, and got surged. By the way, this can also happen if the phone line isn't run through a surge protector, I know a guy whose system got toasted that way.

There's two ways to check this, the first is only of use if your board is not toasted, which I think is the less likely explanation:

1. To see if the image data you are hoping to recover is still there, download a linux bootable cd, like for example knoppix or kanotix. These are roughly 700 mB downloads, so don't try it if you don't have broadband. You can order a cd though for very little money.
   
   Once you download one of these, burn the cd image, then boot the computer with that cd. Linux will not be installed, it is running in ram, but the os will enable you to examine your drives to see if there is any recoverable data on them.
   
   Once you determine if the data is recoverable, you can probably salvage it by copying it over to a large usb flash memory drive directly from kanotix or knoppix.
   
   
2. If you can't boot up from a linux live cd, and if you can't enter the bios, the board is probably toasted. But have no fear, your data is probably fine, sitting there on its hard disk, all you have to do is put the hard disk into another computer and extract the data that way. Or you can get an external hard drive enclosure and hook that up with the old hard drive then download the images from there.
   
   
3. It's also just barely possible that your actual motherboard battery, the cmos one, looks like a nickel sort of, about that size. But it's unlikely, I think your board got toasted.
   

Don't worry, your data is probably fine, but your computer is probably dead.
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