Invalid header code

Ok heres the deal, i installed fedora core 4 a few months back wanting a change from windows... a week later i missed windows so i threw in the good old system restore disk getting back to my original factory settings that came with the computer (computer purchased from tiny, part of the time company and now are out of business, great)

so i popped the disk in pressed 'R' pressed it again, the loading bar gets to 4% and then i get it, "invalid header code" every time no matter what

me being me hopped onto my old comp, went onto the seagate website and downloaded a few iso images of their support programs, put them on my computer and filled the disk with zeros, put restore disk in and there we go, same problem.. "invalid header code" yey

i found a copy of xp professional lying around the house. so i installed it with no problems what so ever, installed all drivers no problems what so ever, but there was one problem that i tried to ignore, 78 gb of the disk had magiclly dissapeared (this was a month or 2 ago) and about 2 weeks ago that 78 gb popped up in another partition and when this hapednt he computer started going awfully slow (it shouldnt athlon 64 3200+ 1 gb RAM 2x200gb HDD)

so yeh trying to work around some problems, slow computer, scanned all virus' spyware etc GONE nothing there to mess it up...

so earlier on i went and found my restore disk again, "invalid header code "

wiped the disk, somehow got the full 200gb back, it just happend

"invalid header code "

great, so i copied the restore disk and put the copy in and same thing "invalid header code "

its like that error "invalid header code" has been drummed into my head i hate it, i need to get rid of it, what is it?

Does anyone out there know anything about this???????

Thanks Darren

 

Hello Darren,

"invalid header code" Does anyone out there know anything about this???????
I don't and it sounds like there is something wrong with that cd.

I think you should stick with XP Pro, this time looking thru this MS reference How to partition and format a hard disk in Windows XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348

Regards - Charles

 

Many times these recovery cds do not contain a copy of windows. In fact they do not contain much of anything. They contain a CDROM based bootable OS and an application similar to norton ghost, drive image, or carbon copy with instructions to access a hidden invalid non dos parition on your hard drive. This partition has a single .gho or .img file on it which can only be seen and accessed by the recovery program.

When you installed Fedora and let it repartition the drive , it probably saw this partition as corrupt, and wiped it leaving only the partition it saw an installed OS on.
When you repartitioned and formatted the drive with XP you definitely wiped it.

Put the Recovery CD in a functional PC and explore it.
If it has a file size of around 700MB, it is a windows install cd. If it is only a few MB, it is just a recovery cd which uses an image file on the hard drive.

The invalid header refers to the boot sector for the OS on the CD referring to the hidden partiton which does not exist. It cannot finish loading since the file is missing.

 

bugger!

well i done it all before a while ago with fedora core 3 then complete partitions etc... and managed to get my reaload disk working and back to my original copy of XP on there before...

grrrr