XP only Boots from CD?

Status
Not open for further replies.

Cerulean

In Runtime
Messages
222
Hey all!

I recently had to reinstall XP on my system after replacing the motherboard. Now, every time I turn on the computer it will only boot with the XP cd in the drive. Post scrolls across the screen and then at the bottom it says "Boot CD". If xp isn't in the drive, it says something along the lines of "DISK BOOT FAILURE. PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER".

I've already gone into the BIOS and messed around with many combinations for the boot order.

Currently my DVD-ROM drive is IDE and I have two SATA drives.

Suggestions and advice would be much appretiated. Thanks!
 
Go into the recovery console and try to use the fixboot and fixmbr commands. See if that does anything.
 
you need to fix your ntldr or set your right hdd to boot. google fix ntldr.exe
 
*UPDATE*

I gave the fixboot and fixmbr a whirl but it still won't boot without the CD in the drive.

Eric, I just saw your post, so I will give that a shot this afternoon. Thanks for your input!

EDIT: I also have the CD-ROM hooked up to the first IDE channel since I have SATA hard drives. Don't know if that makes any difference, but just thought I'd point it out.
 
*UPDATE*

Okay, I tried repairing the ntldr file and even tried replscing it with the one from the disk, but I continue to get the same error. What should I try next?
 
i had the same problem with my dads pc, and for a while i couldnt get rid of it but now n then it comes back but all i have to do is reboot the pc once or twice. Not been happening lately but prob will not i just sed that lol
 
you should have went this route. I hope that you didn't damage anything else

Simple "ntldr is missing" fix with boot floppy or CD, then fix HD

if you get in follow his instructions or back your data up and reformat

Thank you. This led me to the right results. For those who have this problem in the future, I'll sum it all up in this post.

Originally, I started out with a Vista machine. Recently the motherboard died which meant a major hardware change for my computer. Once the motherboards were swapped, I was stuck. Vista doesn't have any real repair options which meant either a reformat was necessary, or I needed to get a new drive and just make the other one secondary. I chose the latter.

This time I decided to take the XP root. The installation went smoothly, but then I noticed every time I rebooted the machine it would always ask for the CD. If there was no CD in the drive, it would give me an "INSERT SYSTEM DISK" message and would fail to boot.

When I rebooted with the CD in the drive and accessed My Computer in Windows, I noticed that the larger partition (the new hard drive) was marked as E.

Now, the fix (and thanks again, Eric!). While Windows was installed on E, the partition still wasn't marked as active. So I went into disk management, right-clicked on the partition, selected "Mark as Active", rebooted, and problem solved.

*SIDE NOTE*

One issue I didn't mention was that the new drive, although 300GB, only came up as having 137GB. Upon installing service pack 2, the machine detected the rest as unallocated space (which was discovered while marking the XP partition as active). From there, I was able to partition the remaining space and fully utilize my hard drive.

Thanks again!!! :)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom