bustagut

Ok I need a genius to help me out here.

I have 2 dell l400 laptops with no external drives. I need windows on both systems. At present I have only 1 drive.

I installed Xp on the drive via a compaq laptop and the drive is fine but when I put it in both dell machines I got the "invalid system disk" error

So I used a compaq armada to copy the I386 directory to the hardrive. I also copied a boot disk to the drive which includes command.com. Problem is I get nothing but "invalid system disk" no matter what Dell laptop I put the drive in.

I am at wits end. Is it my caddy? Im not sure because the bios recognises the drive but will not boot even though I copied a dos boot disk to the drive.

HELP I NEED TO GET TO DOS TO INSTALL WINDOWS !!!!!!!!

Etismixa

There is a change that the harddrive is not compatible with the L400. Is there a fdd in the system? If so, did you try to install the latest bios version? The latest version can be found here. http://support.euro.dell.com/nl/nl/f...v=968&devlib=1 If there is no fdd in the system then try a bios reset. Go into the bios and press the F9. This will reset the bios. Do you still got this message after this?