[Mitchr85]

I just installed Windows XP Home on a reformated hardrive in my sons computer. For some reason it still ask for the Windows XP cd when I try and boot it up. I have the hardrive as the first boot drive in the bios. I have tried to fix this by doing a system repair and editing the boot.ini file but it did not work. I hope someone here could offer some advice to help me correct this. Thanks in advance.

 

[ozrom1e]

If there is something wrong with the boot sectors on the hard drive it will not boot up. I suggest going to the hard drive manufacturers web site and download the hard drive diagnostics for this hard drive and get them to a bootable cd and run them and this will tell you if the drive is ok or not. Try this link for finding what you need:

http://www.onlinecomputertips.com/hardware/drive_utilities.html

 

[Mitchr85]

If there is something wrong with the boot sectors on the hard drive it will not boot up. I suggest going to the hard drive manufacturers web site and download the hard drive diagnostics for this hard drive and get them to a bootable cd and run them and this will tell you if the drive is ok or not. Try this link for finding what you need:

http://www.onlinecomputertips.com/hardware/drive_utilities.html

I will check and see. The drive was working fine I had just pulled it from my daughters computer since she had needed a bigger HD. I formated the drive using XP and then installed it.

 

[welshY]

check the connections are all ok on the drive and motherboard

I had a similar problem wich took me days to cure

it turned out one of the pins on the hard drive had been pushed in a bit too far

the "plug" wasn't making full contact

 

[bernardus]

What is the size of the HD? have you formatted the drive and made it a master with a MBR?
If the MBR is not found the PC can't start and will search for another drive, in this case a CD.
bernardus

 

[Mitchr85]

What is the size of the HD? have you formatted the drive and made it a master with a MBR?
If the MBR is not found the PC can't start and will search for another drive, in this case a CD.
bernardus

It is 40gb. MBR? Is that master boot record? The computer will boot into Windows it just requires the XP Cd to do it as it is now.

 

[bernardus]

MBR is the Master Boot Record yes.
There are more programs that can fix the MBR. You may find them under for instance a partition program or recovery CD or resque diskettes from a restore BU program.
Furthermore the MFT may have been damaged by a sudden power shutoff or an abrupt shut down trough software by for instance a delete key.
Could you start up with safe mode? F8 during startup. And run Ckdsk /f (repair)
Is the drive displayed in the startupscreen. If the drive is not recognised in your BIOS a poor contact of your drives connection may cause such problems. Power off the PC and carefully remove the drives connection and reconnect it carefull not to bend any pins. Try again to start.
bernardus

 

[Mitchr85]

MBR is the Master Boot Record yes.
There are more programs that can fix the MBR. You may find them under for instance a partition program or recovery CD or resque diskettes from a restore BU program.
Furthermore the MFT may have been damaged by a sudden power shutoff or an abrupt shut down trough software by for instance a delete key.
Could you start up with safe mode? F8 during startup. And run Ckdsk /f (repair)
Is the drive displayed in the startupscreen. If the drive is not recognised in your BIOS a poor contact of your drives connection may cause such problems. Power off the PC and carefully remove the drives connection and reconnect it carefull not to bend any pins. Try again to start.
bernardus

Yes the drive is visable on the boot up screen and in the BIOS. I have not tried to go to safe made but I will when I get a chance. I do not think anything bad happened during the installation since I have run the installation with a format twice. I have not had a chance to try anything new since I first posted this yesterday. I hope to get a chance tonight if I do not have to work late again.

Thanks again, Mitch

 

[bernardus]

You may be able to restart a system in save mode (Press F8). Now you can carry out a Ceck and repair under resricted conditions. In another article I gave examples to start a Chck/f command on a drive/partition with Start, Execute etc. *Click Start, Run, type cmd, and then click OK. The Command Prompt should appear. Next you need to indicate the disk you want to repair. Type cd C:\ and then press ENTER. If you expect that the error is on a drive other than C:\ substitute the appropriate letter for the drive you want to check. Next, type chkdsk /f and then press ENTER. This command checks the drive you indicated for errors, while the /f switch fixes any errors. You may have to run the utility more than once to fix all errors on all partitions.
With start execute typ MSCONFIG the menu opens and find a previous system restore point
then OK and see if that runs.
If not succesfull you could run repair with your Windows CD
bernardus