My daughter's laptop motherboard died...The unit powers up, but the error message is "INVALID SYSTEM DISK" upon booting up the machine. Can't get into the BIOS, however, and can't CHANGE the boot device(even tho you can get to the menu for it.... My question is this - is there any way to access C: without REMOVING the HD from the unit (since it does power up to some extent)? This isn't a big deal - she didn't have anything really significant that wasn't already BACKED up - but it does raise my intellectual curiosity...

Any thoughts on how this might be done - if it's possible - would be very much appreciated!

TIA!
NickWhy do you think the motherboard is dead and not the hard drive?Good question - It's what the repair guy told me - and I have a reasonably hi degree of trust that he knows what hes talking about

Unfortunatley, can't get into the BIOS - I can basically get 2 things: the INVALID mssg, or the small menu that gives me my choices for the BOOT device - which it will accept input, but it still gives me the INVALID mssg

Also, I can't get to the DVD/CD rom to try that...When I accessed the boot device menu, I changed the boot device to boot from thr dvd/cd, - it accepted the response, but it still came back INVALID SYSTEM DISK.

I suspect that what I want to attempt here probably can't be done - something like:
power the laptop up & attach it to antoher PC via say the USB or Serial Port, etc & somehow "automagically" have the laptop C: appear as some sort orf remote storage device...Don't know if this is feasible, of course. Obviously, If I could something like what you SUGGEST to work, that's much easier - but I'm not sure that I could get it to work...

Many thanks!

What if you boot from the CDROM with an XP disk in there? Or make a bootdisk (free at www.bootdisk.com) for Win98SE and see if it boots?GX1 there may be a problem.
This is a laptop, so making a bootdisk won't work unless they have a usb floppy drive on hand. i'm not sure, but if you try and get into the bios to make a CD a bootable device, it should be fine, just burn the disk and put it in.I have 3 laptops and they ALL have floppies. bootdisk.com also have CD ISO images. that's nice.