Hello everyone...

Before I start I want to say that I've already tried changing boot devices in BIOS and so on..
Ive bought a new harddrive...
But PC doesnt boot from Windows CD even though Ive booted from the same CD before... I phoned the Customer Service and they told me that It might be the DVD ROM device that is faulty and that I should try booting from another device...

Well... Ive read somewhere that XP doesnt boot(?).. and that I had to boot from the Bootable MemTest86+ ISO.. So I buirned it on a CD... Booted from it and I got this far..

Boot from CD:
1. FD 1.44MB System Type-(00)
(here a underscore keeps blinking but nothing else happens)

The light on the floppy reader remains lit (ive not plugged it upsidedown) while trynig to boot but nothing happens for 10 minutes....



I thought that the PSU might be the problem after all as it doesnt run with graphics card and even from the onboard graphics it doesnt seem to give enough power and so it flickers...

I looked at the PSU and found the values

VOLTAGE = 115V - 230V
Orange = 28A
Red =40A
White = 0.3A

CURRENT = 4-10A, 2-5A
Yellow=17A
Blue=0.8A
Purple=2A

FREQUENCY = 60 Hz, 50 Hz

There is also a note at the bottom of the PSU saying..

450W (which is the one I have) Total Power on +3.3V & 5VIS 170W MAX

Im wondering if anybody knows how to solve this problem now...

You should be able to boot from an XP installation disc, I certainly can.

Is the old HD still in place or is it disconnected?

One of my systems will only boot from a CD/DVD device that's connected as the slave on the primary IDE channel. It will ignore the secondary channel.

Unplug the floppy totally and try it again.

already unplugged and tried.. didtn work...

The HD is a brand new SATA2 Western Digital 250GB drive....

My DVD is master on primary IDE chanell..

1 Check to see if u have a bootable win xp CD (99 % are but just in case)
2 Check if the dvdrom drive is detected in bios
3 In bios make the first boot device cd rom
4 Press any key when the boot from the cd options appear

1) Ive already used this exact same CD to boot before and it woked...

2) it is..

3) it is

4) It doesnt appear... it says... BOOT FROM CD:
DEVICE NOT FOUND INSERT BOOTABLE DEVICE (or something alike)

if u can boot any other bootable cd but u can't boot the win xp one it means the media is defective.
If u can't boot any bootable media cd the issue might resign in the dvd unit

SATA Harddrive is very tricking to have it boot as primary device you have to have special disket (floppy) from HD Manufacturer to get it to work. First you have to have your SATA HD set as booting disc then try to install XP.

I think the issue is not being able to boot the win cd not the sata controller driver

Booting via a SATA controller can have its issues. Boot from regular IDE of from a floppy. It may work to enable USB booting in your BIOS/SETUP.

The other thing that can be wrong is that your current harddisk has a faulty Master Boot Record. For some strange reason the MBR gets read before you even boot from another device which may result in a locked up system. Usually you can solve this by not making this harddisk a bootable device but, for instance, install it on the 2nd controller.

If you cant boot from the CD its defective media. No need to take any other factors into consideration especially if other CD/DVDs are working. Try to create a Win98 bootable CD and then access the DVD drive.

And yes, first prepare your hard drive with Data Lifeguard tools

http://support.wdc.com/download/inde...id=999&swid=30

otherwise it wont boot anyway.

I agree and I learnt it the hard way. But I am glad that I now know the complexities

Sad to see that this thingy is not documented at all even by the manufacturers. For setting up SATA hard drives as bot drives the utility s/w from the manufacturer is required, its not an option.

well it is not quite like this.
Sata can be installed without any floppy if it is set to function in basic mode (as in standard ide ). If it is set to raid mode or ahci xp instalation needs to know the controller drive provided by floppy

Seting sata drive to native (basic) or ahci or raid is a matter of bios options which are not allways included on the motherboard
Even if old regular p-ata (ide) hdds are set in raid mode the xp install needs to have provided the controllers drive

what is data lifeguard tool???

where can I download a win 98 bootable CD?

See the link I provided for the data lifeguard tools - it basically prepares the disk for booting windows.

You can google to find an ISO for a Windows 98 bootable CD "Windows 98 boot disk" - if you have a floppy drive that will also do.

If you use the data life guard tool it comes with its own boot cd so you do not need anything else - just boot using it and run the tools.

ok... but when I boot with XP floppy.. I get into dos... thee is no CD drive.. Ive tried writing
c:
d:
e:
all the way up to i:...
Ive got a CD inserted but it wont find it anyway...
Do you know why?? The CD is recognized in POST and it boots memory test boot cd normally...

Ive burned the lifeguard iso and got the 98 boot disk... will try them in around 30 minutes...

What u actually need my friend is a regular windows bootable cd not some bad copy . U don't need any lifeguard or whatever utility no matter how your hdd is partition or formated or whatever file system u have

All Xp cds are bootable unless they are defective

for older versions of windows that were not bootable u have to create a bottable flopy and modify config.sys and autoexec.bat to initialize the cdrom (ex http://falcon.jmu.edu/~jarvislb/utils/boot_cd.html) but for xp is not the case

nmy windows CD is an original, but its been around for some time and probably gone a bit bad lately...

in DOS when I boot with Cd support from Win98 floppy it tells me that installation cannot be run from DOS...

whn I entered I386 and entered winnt... it told me that my harddrive didnt have enough space for installation... ??

try to make a copy of the win xp on a different machine test the cd and do it again. The hdd space error refers either to the floppy space or tho the virtual drive created

I'm in agreement with Andrei. Given a good copy of a bootable Win XP cd, you should be able to boot from it with no problems. You will run into problems if the CD/DVD drive isn't set as the first bootable device, if said CD/DVD drive is defective, if cable connecting CD/DVD drive is dodgy.

Where you'll run into problems with the installation of XP onto a SATA drive is at the "F6" prompt of the textmode installation (blue screen w/ white text) portion. Depending on your motherboard and the SATA controller on it, you may or may not need SATA drivers on a floppy. Many of the Intel boards do not need drivers, most with Nvidia and Silicon Image SATA controllers will need drivers at the "F6" prompt. One way to get around this is to integrate the drivers into the CD with nLite.

where do I get that program???

will try to copy CD now... will post results soon...

The "...enough space for installation." is because you're booting from a Win98 floppy...only support for FAT32 and the fact that you have no partitions defined on your new SATA drive. "Winnt.exe" is only for situations where you have a pre-defined partition setup and/or network based installations. You, my friend, need a good copy of the bootable XP CD and/or a working reader.

www.nliteos.com

Check the nLite forums at www.msfn.org for more information. You WILL need to know the exact model of your SATA controller when and if you decide to go this route.

Boot using the ISO you burnt and run the lifeguard tools to set up the hard drive.

Please remember that this step is required only to set up the hard drive. You will still be booting from your Windows XP CD to install it. If you cannot get to boot from the CD you can try to recover the CD on another machine by doing a 1:1 copy - maybe the source media has gone bad.

AFAIK you will not be able to install windows using any boot disk - you have to use the Win XP boot/install cd.

That is not true. I could not set up a 320 GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA drive as a boot drive on the ASUS M2N SLI Deluxe without the Seashield hard drive setup tool.

Do some google searches and you'll know the kind of issues I'm talking about. I used to get a lot of strange errors like 'HAL.dll corrupted' etc by using SATA drives directly, without preparing it for a boot drive. I then ran the drive setup tools and everything worked like a charm. In some systems the drive access mode also needs to be selected as 'Large' instead of 'Auto'.

This problem does not happen with some drives (eg: I could setup a Hitachi as a boot drive without any tools)

However in this guys case he actually needs a CD that can boot - Apart from that I was alerting him with the hard drive issue so that that issue is killed and he can concentrate on whats wrong.