Solution(s) For: Bootable CD But No OS Found?

[Rubicone]

I have checked all that I know and cannot understand why I get the meesage " No OS Found" when attempting to boot from the CD which in fact has an OS (Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional). The computer had W2K originally and when trying to reinstall it after getting the noted error message with XP (i.e., no OS can be found on the CD). TIA.

 

[DaiShan]

could you give us a rundown of the hardware in the system, and could you detail how you are going about attempting to install the OS? Are you sure you have an active primary partion?

 

[KingCheeba]

Just asking, but is this a retail Win2k cd? If it is a copy, maybe it wasn't burned right.

 

[Rubicone]

If it's not reading the contents of the CD then I don't see why it would be a hardware problem. Remember this computer had W2K on it and the same CD which was used to install it is now not recognized as having an OS. The method of installing is create a primary DOS partition, set it active, create an extended partition, and a logical drive. Then go into the BIOS change the boot sequence and exit saving the changes. Have the CD with the OS in the CDROM drive, remove floppy from disk drive A, and reboot. Didn't format the C drive as this would be done with the installation of OS as it will be NTFS.

 

[DaiShan]

Things like bad RAM have been known to cause problems when trying to install the OS, hardware is the very core of a computer, without the hardware functioning properly, the software won't function correctly, thus giving all kinds of strange errors. This is why I asked for the rundown of the hardware in your system. Also a bad psu could be a cause the cd-rom might not be getting enough power, the motherboard might not be getting enough power etc. etc.

 

[Rubicone]

Ok. Since this is not my computer I will try to best recall the various hardware. AMD XP 1700, MSI motherboard, 256 MB DDR RAM, Yamaha CDRW, IBM HD, NVidia graphics card, Audigy sound card.

 

[zogg]

Rubicone, I'm glad someone else has seen this happen...I thought I was losing my head.
I thought that running linux on the drive somehow messed with the master boot record but why would i get that problem if I was booting from the cd? After many clearings of the cmos, and fdisk /mbr's, I finally fdisked my drives with linux's cfdisk and i was able to reinstall w2k...don't ask why doing anything to the HD remedied the no os found when booting from the cd???

 

[Rubicone]

I don't know if you had Linux previously installed on your system or not. I had already tried fdisk/mbr. Can one use linux's cfdisk on a machine that has only had W2K installed on it, and do so safely? I am leaning towards it being a BIOS problem not being able to read the boot sector of the CD. The question is how to fix it. Other suggestions leading to a solution are welcomed and appreciated.

 

[michec]

Why don't you create the 4 setup floppies and install via floppy disk?

 

[Rubicone]

That is certainly an option (although it will have to be 6 floppy disks with XP), but does not solve the problem of not having the option of booting off the CD. In particular, if one has to do a repair install at some point in the future.