HELP!! My hard drive will not boot!

[ehc68]

Ok....I will give that a try.

Thanks phucng_10 and Law!!!!!

 

[ehc68]

Ok....well I still haven't tried out the HD and RAM test yet, although I still plan on doing so. I thought I was making some progress. I was able to format the HD on the computer that it's actually going in, then after that, I tried the WIN XP cd and this time I could hear the ROM drive spinning and was getting ready to jump for joy.....until I get the message "NTLDR is Missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

I thought about making a floppy with NTLDR, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini and see if that helps.

Do you think it will?

If so, I guess I would need to type in a "COPY" command.

So would I use a boot disk (maybe win98?) and type the command at the A: prompt?

I'm also not sure if I remember how to type the command....is it "A:\ COPY C:\"?

I found a web page that discusses a how to resolve this problem, but I think it was if Windows was installed on the HD and you needed to boot into Windows and, of course, in my situation I can't even install Windows.

 

[Wverb0783]

if you are having trouble getting the cd to load, press F8 on start up and select boot from cd. that should allow to to do a fresh install on the HDD.

 

[ehc68]

OK....I'll give that a try.

Thanks Wverb!!!

 

[White_Wolf]

Well, I was confused by what all you were talking about in your first post. But let me just ad what I can.

You cannot install windows on to a hard drive using computer "A" and then hook that hard drive up to computer "B". It has something to do with the BOIS's of the computers. You claim you once had success doing this, to which I can only say the two computer's must have had freakishly similar Motherboards/BIOS's.

If your computer will not load CD's from the CD-ROM itself, you're kinda screwed. I have that exact problem. I've even tried switching boot device order, switching jumpers on the CD-ROM, and even swapping another CD-ROM with the computer: my BIOS simply will not run a CD-ROM without a CD-ROM support program like the Win98 Boot floppy has.

Now you claim to have a blank hard drive, and your computer will automatically go into DR DOS when you turn it on?

If I've interpreted that to be true, than what you have is a BIOS with a specific free version of DOS written into it. That's more than I have in my BIOS. But it's not enough.

You cannot run the WinXP setup.exe file while in DOS mode. I've been told it has something to do with DOS not being able to understand NFTS. I don't know if that's true or not, I just know DOS will give you "this program cannot be run in DOS mode" when you try to run the Winxp install/setup file.

My solution was to download a program from Microsoft that extracts itself to 6 floppy disks, and you can use these floppies in order, and then it says "please install the Windows XP Installation CD" and that will get Winxp installed.

The problem with this is that you have no floppy drive. If you're computer can't read from the CD-ROM, and has no floppy, you are screwed.

There's only two things I can think of.
1. Hook somebodies floppy drive into your motherboard (and pray it works).
2. from your DOS prompt, install win98 from your CD-ROM. From Win98, pop in the WinXP CD and attempt to install. You might not be able to get a full install; but only an "upgrade". Hopefully it will allow you to erase win98 and do a fresh install of WinXP.

The only other thing I can think of is to find some kind of multi-OS-installation software that actually allows you the option of installing a variety of Operation systems. I know there are multi-boot software programs that allow you to choose which OS you want to boot from, but I don't know if any of them have a self contained installer program that actually allow you to install different types of OS's.

If you happen to find such a program, please let me know, because I could really use it.

Oh, most of these multi boot programs are floppy disk programs, so you'll have to stick 'em on a CD and then use your DR DOS to install 'em from the CD. They should be able to run in DOS mode.

 

[Zindel]

okay i agree that the not booting to a windows cd is odd...i would try to download a different boot cd like the ones he suggested above and see if those boot. If they dont then you have to have a physical problem, something like your cd drive is bad if you say your boot is set up correctly. Also if your getting a blue screen and then quickly restarting go into your bios and make sure that your computer doesn't auto shut down on errors and look up the stop code at the bottom of the blue screen it will look something like 0x000000 that will help identify the problem. also with some pc's you have to hit f12 to select what boot you want to start when it first loads try that and see if you can pick to boot from a CD.