Newbie XP not booting up

[tbone646]

Just pieced together a new system and installed windows xp pro. When i restart it says: boot from cd : disk boot failure. I cant boot back into win xp. I am a newbie and i have no idea what to do to fix it.
Info about my comp: Abit ic7-g max3
Pentium 4 2.8ghz
512 mb ram
hitachi sata hard drive 3 partitons, xp is on partiton 3
smasung hard drive 3 partitons

Any kind of help would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[johnjkr1]

Sounds like you need to go into you bios and set your computer to boot from ide0 or serial ata, whichever is your boot drive. And if your a newbie, why in the world have you created two hard drives with six partitons??!?!?

 

[tbone646]

I have been messing with the bios for a while and no matter what i change i cant get it to boot. All it does is give me the same message.

 

[KiltedFool]

I ran into something like this at one point, I was trying to set my boot order and didn't realize that the attempted order started at HDD-0, not HDD-1.

Memory's a little fuzzy of the particulars, but the basic gist is remember the count starts at 0 not 1. I had 2 drives in and was attempting to start from disk 2, which I think ended up being my USB memory card reader, obviously not a boot disk.

HTH
KF

 

[tbone646]

i just reformated everything and reinstalled xp. I only have one partiton on each drive. I dont want to restart or anything because i am afraid it wont work again and i will have to start over. I need a little more info. In the bios i set the boot order to floppy then hard disk then cdrom. Any more infoe would be appreciated. Thanks to all that have already helped.

 

[tbone646]

i just reformated everything and reinstalled xp. I only have one partiton on each drive. I dont want to restart or anything because i am afraid it wont work again and i will have to start over. I need a little more info. In the bios i set the boot order to floppy then hard disk then cdrom. Any more infoe would be appreciated. Thanks to all that have already helped.

 

[tbone646]

Well i decided to reboot and it still does the same thing. this is getting annoying.

 

[johnjkr1]

Which drive are you trying to reinstall XP on?

 

[tbone646]

i am installing xp onto the sata drive which is the c:\ drive.

 

[tbone646]

maybe i should install it to the regular ide drive. Everytime i run the setup program it changes the c drive from the sata to the ide so maybe it is telling me something. i will wait to reinstall until someone posts any more info

 

[MrChad]

Try this:

Disconnect all your drives except for the SATA and CD-ROM drive.
Set your boot order to CD-ROM first.
Boot from the XP CD and run setup
After the first reboot, set your boot order to SCSI, CD-ROM
Complete setup
Reconnect second IDE hard drive.

 

[tbone646]

maybe i should install it to the regular ide drive. Everytime i run the setup program it changes the c drive from the sata to the ide so maybe it is telling me something. i will wait to reinstall until someone posts any more info

 

[tbone646]

alright quick question... When i first posted this question i had a cd burner and dvd burner hooked up to the primary ide and a dvd rom and the second samsung hard drive hooked up to the second ide. Like i said before i am a newbie and i thought you could do this but what i am wondering is if this was the problem. I unplugged everything except for the sata drive and the burner and reinstalled it and now it boots up fine. Could this have been the problem? If it was then i would like to know because i will probably end up buying another sata hard drive then. Thanks all for the help. This is a stupid problem, but i am learning and it wont happen again.

 

[MrChad]

Most BIOSes and Windows OSes treat SATA controllers like SCSI controllers. Whenever you select HDD0 or HDD1 in your CMOS setup, you are selecting your IDE harddrives. It's fine to have your DVD and CD drives hooked up to the primary IDE channel, just make sure that the BIOS knows to boot from the "SCSI" (SATA) controller.

The reason you should disconnect your non-essential IDE devices before installing Windows is because Windows setup gets confused when you install to a drive that is not the primary master and can assign the wrong drive letter.

 

[tbone646]

Well i did what you said and disconnected everything and it worked. i havnt hooked the other hard drive back upi am going to put it in a computer that i am going to build for my mom and i am going to buy another sata drive. Thanks all again for all the help i would have spent all day trying to figure out what to do and probably still wouldnt have figured it out.