Question about installing XP on a unformatted drive...

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NiceGuyEd

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Hello all. Quick question.

I've just put a basic computer together from scratch and everything seems fine in bios. It has one 200GB unformatted harddrive in it and a CD-ROm drive. I have the CD-ROM drive first in the boot order followed by the HD and floppy.

When I put my windows XP pro disk in it doesn't read it and says, "Insert disc to boot from cd and press enter".

Do I need to FDISK my harddrive to format it first? Or should windows be running from the CD-ROM drive without a problem?

Any insight is much appreciated.
Ed
 
its not a hd issue, you are either not booting from cd, or your cd isn't bootable.

XP setup will handle an unformatted/unpartitioned drive without any problems.
 
First, check to see that the cd-rom`s jumper is set to master, and that it is connected to the secondary ide channel of your mobo.

Also check that your Windows XP disk is not damaged.

Go into your bios, and set the boot priority to floppy/cd-rom/hard drive.

Put your XP disk into the cd-rom drive,and save and exit bios.

During boot up you should see a message that says "Press any key to boot from cd".

If after doing the above, it`s still no go, then try swapping out the ide cable.

If that doesn`t work, then maybe the cd-rom drive is faulty.

That`s about all I can think of right now.

Regards Howard :) :)
 
One quick thing while I'm in the bios changing up the boot order....

What settings in bios would need to be set speed wise (bus/multiplier) for a system with these specs:

RAM: 333MHz PC2700
Processor: Celeron 340 (2.93GHz) 533MHz bus speed
Mobo suports 533FSB

Thanks for any info!
Ed
 
You shouldn't have to mess with anything in your BIOS as far as speeds.

ie - leave them at default
 
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