I recently built a computer for my mom and the computer works fine, but for some reason it needs the windows XP CD in the cd-rom to start up. I've tried changing the boot sequence to the hard drive and still no change. I was told it might be the hard drive becuase the hard drive was old, so i got a new one, but it still needs the cd. Any thing would help. Thanks
what is the make of the old & new harddrives, are they set as master on primary or secondary, is the cdrom? on the same cable
The old drive was a really old seagate and the new is also a seagate but brand new, 160 gigs. They were on the secondary and i moved it to the primary, both set as the master, with no difference. And no the cd-rom is on a different cable, the cd-rom is also very old, if thats any help.
you just have the one harddrive on the primary cable. what is the speed of the computer as 160gigs is pretty big because i have an idea about something but won't know till speed is known
The computer speed is 2.8 GHz, w/out hyper threading, an abit motherboard, and 512 of ram. The 160 Gig harddrive is the only harddrive in the computer.
did you do a fdisk & format as one partition before loading xp because it looks like the drive is not set active
I cant remember what a fdisk is but im pretty sure i didn't do it. I did set it as one partition, if its not set active how would i do that.
i presume you are using ntfs instead of fat32 because fat32 you could boot up on win98 or winme bootdisk. on xp your going to have to boot up on the cd & somehow do the fdisk routine so you can make drive active. never done your way as i use fat32 when loading xp as it allows me to go thru dos that xp ntfs doesn't have
My moms is on NTFS. If i tried to chang the format would i loose all her files. Also my computer is also on ntfs but i dont need a disk to start up. I think i did do a fat32 once and then changd it.
you might be able to convert to fat32 without losing data, Might!!. try reloading xp on top of self to see if correct problem
do you think i could just load a new one to another partition, and then it would go to that screen where i have to choose a specific Windows XP file?
you would have to use partition magic or something like that without losing info. try reloading xp on top of self
you can install windows ontop of it self without losing data or reloading other programs as long as it goes to the same windows folder as you have now
