unable to boot past floppy

[seawitch999]

okay,Mac...I have no attitude,as I have 3 or four other units to play with...I'm into software and not hardware and I'm trying to see what I did wrong...so far you are making sense to me
as I said before...I removed that hard drive,and reformatted it to fat32.....and no...I did not load windowsxp into it ....I didn't know I was supposed to or how to, when I had it in the external hard drive case,plugged into my Gateway 'Beast'...
So..this is what I wanted to know(what I did wrong),thank you.
how do I load it from my Gateway to the external hd(e),and how can I partition it for Fat32 and NTFS

I simply assumed I would get to 'attempting to boot from CD'............wrong again,lol.................................peace

 

[seawitch999]

apparently my reply from last night posted and showed me as reply #10 in the original forum list(I checked it).....this morning it doesn't show.(why?)
I obviously don't know how to format and load a
hard drive properly...that is the problem Mak.
please advice on proceedure to do so using my Gateway 5012w/XP.
Yes I formatted it to fat 32,but figured to reboot from CD restore disk......so I reinstalled it as is....wrong.
Last night a friend told me to try holding down F11 or 12 during bootup sequence to get to Bio Menus.....I haven't had time yet,as I am very busy,having just moved out west,but is this correct?.......................................peace

 

[Nagasama]

you dont have to have windows installed or anything else to see the bios. the bios is contained in a chip on your motherboard.
yes try F12 or F11.
you should have some sort of bios/boot screen. if you dont, start yanking components and reinstall them.
then try again.
pull one stick of ram, see what happens when you have no hard drive connected, etc etc.
do you get any beeps when you power the system on?
formatting a hard drive is basically as easy as installing it in your system, use your XP install disc, make sure you are set to "boot from CD", and it will basically give you a step by step instructional on how to do it.
it seems your problem isnt formatting the HDD, its that you dont see your bios screen.