win xp will not install

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drickalmighty

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I just built a new computer it is a msi km400 motherboard with a amd semperon 2400+ processor. I have 512 Mb of ram and a 40 Gb wd caviar hd set as primary master and a nec dvd rw drive set as secondar;y master. I fdisked the hard drive while it was still in my old computer and now when I go to install xp on it in my new computer it formats the drive, copies the installation files to the drive, restarts but will not boot from the hard drive. Invalid system disk. I have tried a million different things to get this to work and I am having no luck. If anyone can help that would be great.
 
Go into your BIOS and make sure that your hard drive is set to be the first boot device (in other words, highest priority).
 
Did you set the boot priority back to HDD instead of floppy or cd? Also, if you did, set your hdd as master and nec as slave, or cable select if you have the option
 
Leave your CD-ROM as the primary boot drive. You do not need to switch after the first installation.

Make sure everything checks out BEFORE you install Windows. In other words, make sure the BIOS and POST detect the drives, RAM, etc, in exactly the right ways, and also verify that it is seeing your HDD's with the appropriate settings for them.

Run the Windows installation again. Kill all the partitions and reformat using the Windows installer. Let it do its thing. Once it's done, and you reboot, you should get an option to either boot from the CD, or the HDD.

If this still doesn't work, something is up with your CD. Try creating a set of boot floppies from the MS website and see if those help get things going.
 
the hdd is the primary master and the nec is on the secondary as master. I have changed the boot sequence to every combination possible. It does not give me the option to push a button to boot from the cd it will do it automatically if I don't eject the cd after the restart. It seems like it takes forever to boot up too it says something about dmi pool. No matter what I do it says invalid system disk I even put my hdd in my roomates computer as slave and formatted it there and then took it back out and put it back in mine as master and the same thing happens. I know that the cd works b/c I have used it before actually I used it the other day on my neighbors computer.
 
Shoobie brings up a good point that I should have said in the first place (DUH). Go into BIOS and make sure everything is getting detected ok. YOu could even try putting your CDROM and HD on different IDE channels.
 
My hdd and cd rom are on different ide channels and everything gets detected fine when I boot it up everything that I have inside my machine shows up in the right spot and when windows starts installing it recognizes everything perfectly it is just that evertime I format and all the installation files get copied to the hdd and it restarts I get invalid system disk that is if I eject the cd if I don't eject the cd it will boot from the cd again. my boot sequence right now is at cd-rom - hdd0 - floppy I am lost
 
here is the best part after the hard drive does not boot the windows cd will and if I go to install windows on the c partition it will say that a version of windows already exists. So now I either have to reformat again which does me no good b/c the same thing happens everytime or try to put 2 versions of windows on the same partition which also does me no good b/c neither one of them will boot the hdd.
 
did you set your floppy drive to boot last or disable it, to see if there might be a problem with it.
 
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