windows xp loading failure

[hoothoot]

Hello,

I just recently bought a new 80 gig harddrive. So I simple took out my old one. Replaced it with my new one and reconnected the same wires. I told my bios to boot from cd and inserted my windows XP home into my cd-rom. I get an error message: "DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

Any suggestion? I dont even really know what system disks mean... any help would be much appriciated. Thank you for your time.

 

[N3051M]

it means that its not booting from the cd drive, either caused by faulty drive/cable/connection or damaged CD. Use a live OS like Knoppix or Ubuntu live on a CD and try to boot with it instead. That should tell you if you got a CD problem or if it still can't read it a hardware problem

 

[hoothoot]

so my first step would to burn knoppix onto a cd from another computer and put it in my new computer?

 

[Johnmglen]

Chanage your boot BIOS order to cd first and make sure it is looking at the drive with the disk in (is there any activity on the drive lights etc). It could also be looking at your blank HDD for an OS that isn't there.

 

[SNGX1275]

Chanage your boot BIOS order to cd first. It is probably looking at your blank HDD for an OS that isn't there.

I just recently bought a new 80 gig harddrive. So I simple took out my old one. Replaced it with my new one and reconnected the same wires. I told my bios to boot from cd and inserted my windows XP home into my cd-rom. I get an error message: "DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

He did that.

Recheck all the connections, recheck that the BIOS is set to boot the CD drive first.
If those check out, disconnect the new hard drive from the motherboard and try again, see if it will boot off the cd then. Unlikely it will, but if it does either you set something wrong in your BIOS or something else wierd is happening.

 

[Johnmglen]

Yeh, see edit! It does sound like it is not looking at the cd drive though.

 

[SNGX1275]

I can see this happening if he's using a copied version of XP where the disk was copied to hard drive (or image extracted) and then just burned to the disk, without making it bootable.

memtest86 has a tiny iso file you can download and burn to a disk (to save you the time of dling 700 megs for a live linux distro) that way you can quickly get to seeing if its going to boot off a cd at all.

 

[hoothoot]

still having problems. I put in ubuntu and it still gives me the same error
how could i contact memtest86 or get that file.

 

[Rick]

To rule out a simple configuration problem, most BIOSes have a boot menu. Usually be pressing F10 instead of the key you usually press to get into the BIOS, it will bring up a boot device menu. Then you can temporarily (and manually) select the correct drive. If you do this and it still doesn't work, then I would suspect hardware failure.

 

[Samstoned]

older cd players can crap out on a bootable
make sure it is set to master 2nd ide channel dont use Cable select
realy clean the disc good
if the cd palyer has a jumper for dma/ pio change it around see what happens
do you see it in boot screen?

 

[N3051M]

still having problems. I put in ubuntu and it still gives me the same error
how could i contact memtest86 or get that file.

To answer that question,

Tutorial: How to use Memtest

although like the others say, it could be a hardware problem relating to your CD drive or connection..

 

[SNGX1275]

Ubuntu's disk has a menu right after it boots where you can choose a couple of install modes, boot from the hard drive, another option they give is a Memory Tester or something similarly named, and that is memtest86.

I realize you can't get there because it won't boot off the Ubuntu disk, but if it won't boot off that its not going to boot off a straight memtest disk either.

 

[hoothoot]

turns out it was just a problem with my jumper and it was on "cable select" mode instead of duel master. the problem seems to be solved for now. thanks for all your help