Failure to boot from hard drive (install CD works, however)

[William Jones]

Aloha everyone,
I have an extremely strange problem with my computer. Earlier today, I
had to reboot the machine. No big deal, right? BTW, I'm running WinXP Pro
on this one. It went through the POST, then checked the DVD and floppy
drives for bootable media, but failed to load up the OS from the hard drive.
I couldn't think of anything to do, as this has never happened to me, and
finally resorted to slicking the hard drive and attempting to reload WinXP.
Well, as everyone knows, during the install process, the machine is rebooted
at least twice. The setup program attempted to reboot the machine, with the
same result - in other words, even after the hard drive's partition had been
deleted and the hard drive reformatted with NTFS, the same failure to boot
from the primary hard drive remained. I didn't know what to do at that
point, so I stuck in my Windows 2000 install CD (that one is bootable - the
WinXP CD is not), but didn't push any key at the prompt (Press any key to
boot from the CD ...) and it went straight to the WinXP setup program.
As it is now, as long as I leave the Windows 2000 CD in one of the DVD
drives, the machine will boot up into WinXP. If, however, I take it out,
the machine fails to boot from the primary hard drive. What can I do to
rectify this problem? I've never experienced anything at all like this
before, and have been unable to find any guidance with this matter anywhere
on the internet. I'm at a failure to understand what could have caused this
problem and would appreciate any assistance anyone can provide.

Thanks in advance,

William Jones

 

[Guest]

William

Can you give some more detail regarding IDE devices and interfaces:

eg:

IDE 1: HDD 120Gb [Partition 1 - 100Gb, Part 2 - 20Gb] Master [Windows XP] + CD ROM Slave
IDE 2: HDD 40Gb [no [artitions] Master + DVD-ROM Slave

Also what is your BIOS boot sequence set to eg: CD, C Drive, A or A, C, CD

 

[William Jones]

Thanks for the quick response,
IDE1 has two HDD and IDE2 has the two DVD drives. They are:

IDE1 120Gb HDD, split into two partitions (Primary drive)
c:\ is first partition (68.36 Gb) - NTFS
e:\ is second partition (46.13Gb) - NTFS

160Gb HDD (Slave drive)
one partition - NTFS

IDE2 Plextor 708A DVD+-R/RW (Primary drive)
LG DVD-ROM (Secondary drive)

Currently, the boot sequence is: floppy
DVD drives (it
checks both, but I'm not sure of the order)
HDD

As I wrote before, as long as the Win2k install CD is in either of the DVD
drives, and I don't press any key when the "Press any key to boot from the
CD ..." prompt appears, the computer will wait for the prompt to time out
and then boot into the default OS, which is WinXP. If, however, the install
CD is not in either of the DVD drives, the computer hangs after checking the
floppy and DVD drives. Even though a valid OS is on the primary drive of
IDE1, the computer doesn't know how to boot into it. This is really strange
and a problem I've never come across before. This just happened yesterday,
and I can't determine any actions on my part which could've caused such an
event. Thanks again for your reply and I hope that you can at least point
me in the right direction for a possible solution.

Thanks again,

William Jones

William

Can you give some more detail regarding IDE devices and interfaces:

eg:

IDE 1: HDD 120Gb [Partition 1 - 100Gb, Part 2 - 20Gb] Master [Windows XP] + CD ROM Slave
IDE 2: HDD 40Gb [no [artitions] Master + DVD-ROM Slave

Also what is your BIOS boot sequence set to eg: CD, C Drive, A or A, C, CD

Aloha everyone,
I have an extremely strange problem with my computer. Earlier today, I
had to reboot the machine. No big deal, right? BTW, I'm running WinXP Pro
on this one. It went through the POST, then checked the DVD and floppy
drives for bootable media, but failed to load up the OS from the hard drive.
I couldn't think of anything to do, as this has never happened to me, and
finally resorted to slicking the hard drive and attempting to reload WinXP.
Well, as everyone knows, during the install process, the machine is rebooted
at least twice. The setup program attempted to reboot the machine, with the
same result - in other words, even after the hard drive's partition had been
deleted and the hard drive reformatted with NTFS, the same failure to boot
from the primary hard drive remained. I didn't know what to do at that
point, so I stuck in my Windows 2000 install CD (that one is bootable - the
WinXP CD is not), but didn't push any key at the prompt (Press any key to
boot from the CD ...) and it went straight to the WinXP setup program.
As it is now, as long as I leave the Windows 2000 CD in one of the DVD
drives, the machine will boot up into WinXP. If, however, I take it out,
the machine fails to boot from the primary hard drive. What can I do to
rectify this problem? I've never experienced anything at all like this
before, and have been unable to find any guidance with this matter anywhere
on the internet. I'm at a failure to understand what could have caused this
problem and would appreciate any assistance anyone can provide.

Thanks in advance,

William Jones