Hello and Help! CD-ROM errors...

[paulintheuk]

Hello everyone, this is my first post and I would greatly appreciate some help!

The scenario, girlfriends PC dies, MB blown so... New MB, CPU, PSU and case. Only HDD, optical drives and memory retained. MB is an ECS RS400-A. HDD on IDE primary channel, optical drives on secondary.

Problem: Can't install XP for some reason, disk doesn't autorun and obviously cannot run XP from the MS-DOS prompt. This is further confused by the fact that I went back and ran an old copy of Windows 98 SE (creating CABS files on the C drive and running setup from there). This works fine, so the CD-rom works in DOS, on the generic drivers used on the boot disk... However it then refuses to show an optical drive in Windows, which obviously is preventing me upgrading the OS to XP.

I realise I am probably missing something incredibly obvious but I'm slowly going crazy with it!

 

[tomrca]

are you trying to install over/upgrade your OS. if you are you will need to boot from cd. that means changing the order of the boot system. this can be achieved by pressing F11 on anf off continuously as the pc is booting,selct the rom drive as 1st option, insert disc then select ok. it should run from there. you will need to format the drive as it not possibble to run xp and win 98 on the same hd. hope that helps

 

[paulintheuk]

Thanks for the reply,

unfortunately I've already set the BIOS to boot in this order: Floppy, CD-rom, HDD and it's still not working

Any other ideas?

 

[tomrca]

ok. but go back into bios and set cd-rom as first, not floppy if it is a cd you are trying to install xp from. did you try the F11 option?