Laptop cannot boot to window, cd or floppy

[schnewb]

Hello.

I recently purchased a second hand laptop, a packard bell easy one silver 2800. The laptop came with wondows xp pre installed but i wanted to install windows 98 because an old system would probably benefit from it.

Anyhow i tried to format disk in windows and it wouldnt do it. I tried to boot from the win98 cd and it wouldnt boot. I asked my friend about it and he told me you could use partition magic to make a seperate partition which i could install win98 to. So i let my friend try this. The program made the partition and restarted and now it wont boot to the OS, wont boot from cd and wont boot from a floppy. The error "invalid system disk" keeps occuring during bootup.

What can i do? Changing the boot record in windows doesnt do anything and nothing else springs to mind apart from the methods i have tried. The only answer i can come up with is to buy a new drive, is this the only way?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Sean

 

[Nodsu]

Have you actually set the laptop to boot from CD in BIOS?

Some laptops want you to press a key to get a boot menu where you select the device to boot from.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Also, you can NOT install W98 AFTER XP.
You need to use a W98 bootfloppy (from e.g. www.bootdisk.com, set your BIOS to boot first from floppy, then use FDISK to delete the partitions that are on it, then create a new primary partition, using all available harddisk space.
Finally format that in FAT32. Now Install W98.

 

[schnewb]

Thanks for the replies.

Ive tried the things you have suggestion prior to posting this thread and nothing works. I bought a windows bootable floppy and the laptop refuses to boot from it. The floppy drive could be broken as like i said i bought it used. I think im going to use the local computer shop and see if they can fix it. If they cannot im gonna have to buy a new hard disk.