Cannot boot to XP Pro without CD in drive -- DPW --

[David]

I (Fresh/clean)installed Win XP on a brand new machine.
The install went fine the patches are fine...everything
works great. EXCEPT...I cannot boot the machine without
the WinXP CD in the drive.
The BOOT FROM CD> PRESS ANY KEY TO BOOT FROM CD will come
(I do not press a key to allow it to boot from hdd and
everything is fine as long as the CD is in the drive.

I remove the CD and it says it cannot boot...I have tried
to completely reformat again and no change...I have
another machine that is almost exactly the same except
that this one has a 80 GB HD the other one has a 40 GB HD.

I changed the boot sequences and no change...

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

DPW

 

[sgopus]

From what I see, your change of boot did not take affect
if changed to boot to the primary hd as first choice, the
option to boot to cd should not appear it will go to your
hd first and find the mbr, have you made your boot hd
primary or logical.
Could you detail how you changed the boot sequence in bios.

 

[David]

If I remove the CDROM from BIOS complete boot sequence
completely and put HDD-0 (master primary) I get the error
right off the bat.

I am going to try a different HDD to see if possibly the
MBR of the new drive is bad...

The drive is set up as primary.

It is behaving as if it never sees the MBR

 

[sgopus]

Could you have turned on the sector 0 virus protect.
I would think this would come up with an error when tried
to install the os, so that would be obvious.

I know this may seem like dumb question week but needs to
be asked.

are you certain it's installing to the primary drive C
and not some ram drive??? for the MBR not to be found
it either has to be going some other place, or the MBR is
protected in some manner, The bios doesn't seem to be
taking the change from booting to CD to booting to HD
I know on mine if I say primary first choice is the hd
the boot to cd choice never appears. it only happens when
I list cdboot as first choice, or floppy/cd/hd....
Have you checked to see if the mb battery is properly
connected, and has voltage, try to rest bios to default
from cmos factory settings, which should be hd first.

 

[david w]

If I put the HDD-0 as the only boot device I do not get
the BOOT TO CD.... you are correct. I check the bios virus
setting and it is disabled. The drive is the hd. When XP
does boot the 80 GB is there. I can write data to the HD
and hear the drive spin and it is there after a reboot...

I think the drive is #%$^$^!!!!

 

[sgopus]

do this for me please, detail step by step what you have
done to perform your fresh install.

I mean
step 1 power up the pc
2 insert the cd
3 choose the option to format the drive using NTFS format

etc.

I am still getting the feeling that some step in this
process is getting missed.