Monday, October 31, 2005

Invalid system disk

I was updating Solaris on my W2100z the other night. After applying the latest recommended patches, I rebooted and went off to get a drink.

On my return I was rather startled to find displayed the old message "Invalid system disk. Press any key to continue." Oh bother - what's gone wrong?

It would be a bit of a pain, because I do quite a bit of development on this machine and I really don't want to lose it. The usual suspect in these cases would be a floppy disk, but the W2100z doesn't have one, so I was worried for a second that the main disk had been trashed.

But then I worked out what had happened. I had taken the recommended patch bundle home on a zip disk, and left it connected. So the invalid disk it was complaining about was in fact the one I had left in the USB zip drive. (So clearly the W2100z is capable of booting off a USB device. Scary.)

Panic over...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks to you i finally got my system working :-) I have been diagnosing as to what the hell would have gone wrong as it was working perfectly ok and all of a sudden would budge anywhere near windows.. the USB was attached and after reading your post.. i simply disconnected it and voila.. Windows XP!

Though it seems that the content of the USB has an effect on this. I have NOT selected USB bootup anywhere in the BIOS but still it looks into it.. weird.. thanks anyways!

Zz