Disk Boot Failure

albertross_2

when you format it, that will stop it booting from HD, set the cd rom to boot first in the bios, put the XP CD in, and install.

If it's another old PC that won't boot from CD, you'll have to download the boot floppies from microsoft.

caveat_emptor

If all else fails get someone to download the HDD diagnostic program from Seagate website on to a floppy and boot from it. Recently used this to find out why PC wouldn't boot and found bad sector.

thomas01155

i just tryed that and it still cant see the hardrive the progarm cant ether.

alwaysskint96

Can you see the hard drive in the BIOS settings?Does the HDD light show when trying to boot Maybe the drive has died if not

thomas01155

which one is that theres one whit a blub picture and one which something else but i dont no what that is but they both light up.

startrekker

in the bios settings can you reset to the default settings and then reboot the machine to see if its a bios issue, could be that the hard drive isnt set to auto detect and this would certainly mean you cant access the drive, i know its happened in the past with me on an older nmachine

johnmc

If you had XP on the machine then a Win98 boot disc won't see it as it's NTFS and Win98 is FAT32.

Using the boot disk FDISK to remove the primary partition, reinstall it and make it live. Reboot to the boot disk.

Now format the drive (which will now be in FAT32). You should now be able to load XP and convert back to NTFS.

thomas01155

i put in my xp install disk theres no disk in the floopy i have put the bios so i runs for disk i have checked that my hard drive is the master salve and connected probly but my computer still cant see it. When it runs the xp install i get an erro say cannot find hard drive my sure its installed and im not trying to install 98 im trying to get my computer to start up.