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new dvd drive, windows wont load?

B

BradN

Junior Member
I am a newb at this so help me out please!

I just got a new dvd burner (nec nd-2500a)

I put it in my computer (Dell Dimension 2400), plugged it up, and turned my computer on. Well, it loaded windows, got to the desktop, and froze up. it wouldnt do anything. so i had to use the power button to reboot. it did the exact same thing again. rebooted. this time it got to the screen right before windows starts loading and says "invalid boot.ini, loading from c:windows, missing hal.dll" and thats as far as it would go.

So now I put in my win xp cd, and boot from it. i tried to use the "recovery console" but I guess i forgot my password so i couldnt use that. I just re-installed xp without formatting to try and save everything. So now I just plugged the drive back up and tried to boot. It, once again, gets to the screen just before windows loads, and just stops. It wont do anything. I unplugged it and windows loads up just fine.

So is it a bad drive, or am I just doing something wrong?
 
First off, is the DVD drive seen by the bios? In dell's, you have to turn on the secondary channels as they are off from the factory. Second, what jumpers do you have it set to? Most dell drives are set to CS, so you have to set your cdrom's to that as well. Instead of a dirty install on top of itself, you should have tried a repair install, you boot from the xp cd, choose enter to install windows, then choose to try to repair that installation. If that doesnt work, your probably going to have to format at this point.
 
Yeah, I am going to reformat after I back up all my stuff. I was needing to do that anyway.

Where are the jumpers and how do I change them? IS that something in the bios?
 
Jumpers are physical jumpers on the drives themselves (the hard drive, dvd drive, etc). They can be set to master, slave or cable select. When I last left Dell, all drives went out cable select. Most drives you get from the store (like your DVD burner) are usually set to master. Of course, you cant mix master/slave and cable select, things go horribly wrong. If your formatting, make sure your not connected to the net untill you get SP1 installed, unless your behind a router. And dont forget the chipset drivesrs.
 
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