Trouble with Athlon/ECS K7S5A system - Won't boot properly

[PCDumbass]

Hi guys, I have a question for you all.

I recently built an Athlon XP system, ECS K7S5A motherboard, 256MB Ram, 10Gb HDD and I cannot get it to boot properly.

I usually just pop my Windows XP CD into the CDROM and the PC will boot up immediately and start to install WinXP, but this time, it keeps saying that the CD is invalid? WTF? I've verified that the CD itself is good on another PC and it still does it. I've even tried booting up from a floppy disk and it still won't boot. It keeps saying that the disk is invalid (both floppy and CD drives). How weird.

I've tried different BIOS setting so that the PC will first boot from the floppy or the CDROM. Neither one works.

I was beginning to wonder if the CDROM and/or floppy was bad, but the Secondary Master Devise is picked up immediately when booting up (CDROM) and the Floppy does seem to work OK. I even disconnected the floppy altogether to see if that was the problem, but the PC still wouldn't boot from the CDROM.

If anybody has any input to add, I'd love to hear it. I'm trying to learn as best I can, but I do lack some troubleshoooting skills.

 

[mechBgon]

At the POST screen, hit the F8 key. When POST is complete, it'll let you manually pick your boot device. See if your CD drive works when you pick it from the list this way. Good luck!

 

[PCDumbass]

Hey man, thanks for the advice.

The problem was the CD-ROM, it was toast.