PC will not start up w/o the windows XP cd inserted

[timmer]

I recently upgraded my pc with new mobo,cpu,video card.it does not matter what the boot priority is.without cd as one of them it won't work at all.It does appear that it is booting off the HD cause the little green light is on,not the one on the optical drive.my pc specs are P4 3ghz 530j Abit SG-80DC
mobo
KBYTE 512Mb 400ddr, western digtial 160GB HD Diablotek 6200 256mb agp card Allied psu 400 watts 2 dvd drives with Phoenix award bios 6.0pg.

I hope someone has a idea how to remedy this. And I have to let it get to where you have to decide to set up xp or repair or quit set up. Press F3 to quit then let it restart before it boots up.If the pc was already and restarting it ,it will reboot w/o having to go to the set up menu first.Well bye for now,gonna play Call of Duty for a little while and call it a night.

 

[Tedster]

Your boot drive is probably corrupted. run CHKDSK or crap cleaner...

 

[raspygold]

if that doesn't work then possibly writing a new boot sector may work from the Windows Recovery.

 

[Nodsu]

Forget about Tedster and raspy.. If Windows boots, then the MBR and Windows are OK.

"Won't work at all" means what? The PC turns off? A giant red dialog box appears saying "I won't work at all!"?

What if you press reset or ctrl+alt+del before the "won't work at all" happens?

 

[timmer]

There is no xp logo no loading screen,no wallpaper,start menu.I get the message:boot disk failure please insert system cd press enter to restart.I f I press alt+ctrl + del it restarts back to the screen where it recognizes your cpu & other stuff. There is only one ide controller listed under pci devices
but all the drives are recognized.With this motherboard Call of Duty single player will not open with the anti virus enabled.The HD is about 4 months old
I guess the anti virus is not the culprit? I have write caching turned off [that
increases your HD performance]

 

[Nodsu]

Yes, of course, there is absolutely no point in mentioning the error message you get when you have computer problems

Did it start up properly after you did the ctrl-alt-del thing? What if you do the ctrl-alt-del thing for the second time around too?

Also, keep to a single proplem per thread. If the machine can't boot, then the proplem has nothing to do with any software or games.

You should test your hard drive with the diagnostic utility supplied by the manufacturer.

 

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

I think you need to go to the CMOS setting or whatever in the BIOS and let it autodetect the drive there. That should allow it to 'see' the drive.

 

[desto]

Same here

I have the exact same problem, windows xp doesn't start up unless the installation cd is inserted at boot time. Already tried fixing the MBR with no results, and I'm really starting to get pissed.

Although this thread is old, help will be appreciated.

 

[raspygold]

I have the exact same problem, windows xp doesn't start up unless the installation cd is inserted at boot time. Already tried fixing the MBR with no results, and I'm really starting to get pissed.

Although this thread is old, help will be appreciated.

When you say you tried to fix your MBR did you write a new one? That probably replaced your partition table and so you may have lost all data on the disk until you recover it from Linux or something similar.

 

[desto]

When you say you tried to fix your MBR did you write a new one? That probably replaced your partition table and so you may have lost all data on the disk until you recover it from Linux or something similar.

No. I cans still access windows if and only if the installation cd is inserted. I've tried installing it from scratch about 5 times now and still the same problem.

 

[zackdelabrocha]

Have you format the drive using fdisk and format command prior to installing windows. try it first and see what happens.