OMG I really did it This time! Please help!

[ocsickgirl]

Well this is my last resort. I hope someone here can help me.
I decided to Clear my hard drive last night and start over.
My boyfriend who "supposably" knows about computers helped me.

I totally cleaned the hard drive. I have a Windows XP professional
disc So I put it in the cd rom drive and changed the BIOS to boot from the cd rom and it's not working!
I can't get the computer to boot with it. I'm sorry i'm sooo lame.
Fortunatly i have a 10 year old computer that i can still get internet on so here I am SOSing for help via this heap.

Any thoughts would help alot! thanks!
- Cammy

 

[scherzo]

how did you clean the hard drive? normally you would boot from cd and then delete the drive, then install.

it is difficult to diagnos. do you have more than one drive? Is the disk dirty?

if everything works like it is supposed to you may need a boot disk (floopy) fortunatley your old machine can make one, there is already an article here on booting you machine from floppy, i'll see if i can find it and hotlink it

didn't have to look to far, here is the link

https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic14204.html

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

Just in case you`ve missed something, do the following and see if it helps.

1 Restart your computer and go to setup usually by pressing the F2 or delete key.

2 Once you get into setup look for the boot menu and make sure you set it to boot from cd first followed by your hard drive.

3 Put the Windows xp disk into your cd.

4 Now save your settings and exit setup.

5 While your computer is booting you will see a message that says "press any key to boot from cd" press any key.

6 When the welcome to setup screen appears press enter and then press F8 to accept the Microsoft licence agreement.

7 You will be prompted to repair an installation press the escape key.

8 Now select the partition that you want to reformat and press the D key to delete it you will be asked to confirm that you want to delete the partition.

9 Now press C to create a brand new partition you will be asked what size you want the partition to be in mega bytes. If you just press enter then the partition will be the maximum size that you can have. This is perfectly ok if you don`t want to create multiple partitions.

10 You will now be asked to format the partition select the ntfs file sytem and do a full format.

11 Once the format is complete setup will continue.

Your computer will restart during the remaining setup again you will be asked to press any key to boot from cd DO NOT PRESS ANYTHING and setup will continue. Once the setup is complete and you are back in Windows remove the Windows cd from your cd drive.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

 

[ocsickgirl]

my boyfriend used killdisk.com and used killdisk to whipe the harddrive.
It boots as far as when i turn it on i can see the "GATEWAY" thingy and i can get into the BIOS but after i set it to boot from the CD it never finds it.

on a gateway you give it 5 things to try and boot from, you can't turn the other 4 off just make the cd rom first.
When it's supposed to boot from the cd I heard the floppy drive turn on and BRRRRRP!
Then it continues to the next thing to try and boot from i don't see the light from the CDROM on at all except when i first turn the computer on and that's it.
I also have a CDRW drive which is external USB but i have unplugged it for now while trying to figure this out.

I set the bios. I'm stuck because after it go's and looks for it and doesn't find it it says no operating system found.

I looked at the other thread but since the computer i want to install the OS doesn't have anthing on it it kinda doesn't apply.

Did this info help? Man this blows! I'm 25 female and everyone assumes because i can use aol instant messanger lol that i know about computers but i'm as dumb as a rock. Please help!

 

[howard_hopkinso]

You could try downloading the Microsoft Windows xp boot floppies from HERE. Make sure you download the correct version for your particular OS. I.E Windows xp original/Windows xp sp1/Windows xp sp2.

You will need to run the programme in order to create six floppy disks. Read the instructions carefully.

You will need to set your boot priority to floppy drive/cd-rom/hard drive.

Regards Howard

 

[ocsickgirl]

howard thank you so much. I don't have any floppys lol i'll go to target right now and get some. Thank you you're a god send. I hope it works Thank you from the retard - Cammy

 

[alidabiri]

anyway.
you have wiped out the cdrom driver.
try this:
1 - get a win 98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com
2 - in your bios set it to start from floppy first
3 - start your machine with 98 boot disk
4 - after start, choose "start windows with cd-rom support.
5 - at the command prompt, enter you cd-rom drive letter followed by colon:
c: is your hard drive, d: is ram deive and e: is your cd drive for now.
6 - enter winnt.exe or winnt32.exe
this will start windows xp install process.

 

[ocsickgirl]

I did that alidabiri But it's not recognizing the drive. it says it's not found. Does this mean i have to do the XP boot . I used the win 98 boot and i followed all the instructions in the other post about how to boot with out a cd but it doesn't work once i do the DEVICE=C:\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001
It doesn't let me do anything it continues to say it cant find the drive that
MSCD001 doesn't exist.

i also have a USB CD rom is there any way i can use that?
I have it unplugged right now but i can plug it in.
It's just irriatating me because i have to keep pluging my PC that works in to come back online, then unplug it plug in the one that doesn't work to try all these things and i've been going back and forth all day

 

[alidabiri]

if you just boot with 98 boot disk, it will give you option to start with cd-rom support. you don't have to do that mscd001 stuff. after you start, type fdisk.
choose option to display active partitions. then delete the active partition. then create a partition. restart the pc with 98 disk again. now type: format c:
this will format your hard disk.
then put your xp cd in the cd-rom drive.
navigate to the cd:
type e: (d: will be the ramdrive)
once in e: (the cd), type winnt.exe or winnt32.exe
this will start xp install process.