Cant boot from hd or cd

[probizzle]

ok so my friend at his work said they were throwing away a couple good dell computers (Gx260) i thinkp4 1.4ghz the small tiny ones so i told him to grab me 2 of them so he did. so they came with windows 2000professional on it and was password protected so i was going to try to install xp so i switched the hd out for a bigger one and this is what im getting. i boot from the cd rom drive and it says strike f1 to retry boot, f2 for setup utility? and if i push f1 it displays the same error over and over agian, and if i try to boot from the hard drive it says error loading operating system? i i thought it might be the cd rom so i swapped it out for a dif one and does the same thing. any help?

 

[kimsland]

You were given two options F1 (you tried) and F2 (umm nothing!)

F2 will allow you to set up the boot order for CD as first bootable drive

 

[probizzle]

ive pushed f2 it takes me to the bios and i have changed it to boot from the cd rom
thats the first thing i did

 

[probizzle]

ive pushed f2 it takes me to the bios and i have changed it to boot from the cd rom
thats the first thing i did

 

[kimsland]

Probably should have mentioned that

It must mean:
your Cd is faulty
The cd drive is faulty
The CD (disc) is not bootable

 

[probizzle]

ok well i got 2 diffrent xp cds and they both end up doing the same thing i tried one and the computer froze after i said to boot it from the cd rom. i tried the other xp cd and it gives me the same error any clue now?

 

[probizzle]

ok well i got a new error when booting from a cd it says "CDBOOT: Cannont boot from CD - Code : 4"
any clue?

 

[kimsland]

As above - The CD/DVD drive is faulty

 

[probizzle]

ive tried 3 diffrent cd roms and get the same error and ur saying a faulty cd drive.... ive taken a working cd drive out of my working computer and got the same error... wierd

 

[kimsland]

Ok

CD is bootable
CD is known working
Drive is known working

Jumper on back of ATA CD/DVD Drive set to CS or Master (just swap it ie instead of Master make it CS)

Data cable (ATA or Sata) ?
Motherboard (Although you could connect the drive to the Hard Drive connection (and temporarily remove the Hard Drive just to confirm)

 

[probizzle]

ok the drive is set to master and i hooked up a floppy drive and made a 98 boot disk to see if that would work but when i hooked up the floppy and told it to boot all i get is a blinking line and nothing comes up im about to give up on this thing

 

[kimsland]

lol (although you're serious)

Have you got both Sata and IDE together in that machine?
Sometimes that just doesn't work (ie you may need a Sata CD/DVD)

 

[probizzle]

nope the hd and cd rom are all ide

 

[kimsland]

ok the drive is set to master

Have you tried CS (the norm)

Also you have:

IDE 0 going to HDD (CS)
IDE 1 going to CD (CS)

I hope

And did you try putting the CD into IDE 0 (and removing the HDD) just to test if the CD boots

One last option, sometimes the floppy can cause IDE issues (just unplug the data cable (M/B end)