damn windows xp!! won't boot up

[mcveigh]

SOB
I had to reinstall winxp from scratch on my laptop tonight, everything went fine till just nowI was installing other programs, specifically pgp was the last one, rebooted

and here is what I get

"remove disks or other media
press anykey to restart"

nothing is in the floppy drive.

what gives

 

[Buz2b]

"remove disks or other media

Anything in the CD drive? Other than that why don't you reboot with the XP CD in the drive (first select to boot from CD in BIOS) and allow it to "repair" the installation. It's still early in the process so this shouldn't make a big difference. BTW, what is "pgp"? Pardon if stupid question.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Buz2b

"remove disks or other media

Anything in the CD drive? Other than that why don't you reboot with the XP CD in the drive (first select to boot from CD in BIOS) and allow it to "repair" the installation. It's still early in the process so this shouldn't make a big difference. BTW, what is "pgp"? Pardon if stupid question.

PGP = Pretty Good Privacy.

Its an encryption program (for email, files, etc). http://www.pgp.com/ should have more information about it.

 

[Buz2b]

Thanks for the info! Now back to our regularly scheduled program.....................................

 

[mcveigh]

now I'm getting worried, I can get into a command shell with the windows cd but I tell it to "fixmbr" (just guessing at what I need to do). but everything I try I still get the same error. I wonder if it's a hardware problem?
has anyone heard of that error before?

 

[Buz2b]

You might want to try the easy things first. I had similar (though not exactly) problem the other day and it was a result of a combination of bad ide Cable and improper Master/Slave setup on my devices. Most likely not what you are experiencing since it is a Lappy, but what I'm trying to say is look for the "no-brainer" stuff first. When you boot to the BIOS can/does the system "see" the CD and/or HDD (all IDE devices) and identify them correctly? Is there a chance that a cable connection is loose, etc?

 

[mcveigh]

I don't think it's a ide cable, I have never even heard of this error message before.

I'm going to try and load grub as a boot loader since XP overwrites the mbr, and I have RH 7.3 on half the drive

 

[mcveigh]

got grub to work, but when I load windows explorer locks up and norton AV does also very weird, I'll probably reinstall again

weird

 

[Buz2b]

and norton AV does also very weird

Why do you have that running when you are trying to load windows? Or is that what happens after you load?

 

[NogginBoink]

I have never heard of the error message you describe, so I must ask the obligatory question:

Are you SURE you've reported the EXACT error message to us?

If the answer is yes, I'm curious to know where in the boot process your system is failing. To the best of my knowledge, that error message is not a Windows error message, and believe me, I've seen most of the boot-failure Windows error messages.

I suspect that this message is coming from your BIOS; it sounds like the error message most of us are used to "non system disk or disk error." If this is the error message you're getting, it means that your computer is not able to find a bootable disk drive. There could be several possible causes for this.

Fixmbr was a good first step. By the way, that shell is NOT the cmd.exe or command.com command shell. Recovery Console is a wrapper around text-mode setup (setupdd.sys) and though it looks and smells like cmd.exe, it is not. As a result, you can only run the commands listed by the help command.

 

[mcveigh]

well I'm typing this from atlanta on the laptop in linux.

yes that was the exact error, I also feel it was a bios message now. obviously something happened to windows that messed up my MBR and windows files.

I'm going to download a disk utility from IBM and see if it says anything about my hard drive. anyone else have any ideas?

BTW: I was driving up to atlanta today (6 hrs) and I called into a computer show on talk radio, I asked them about this and they didn't have a clue one guy tried to blame me for have multiple OS.

I was polite though