setting up windows 2000 on harddrive from bios!

[psd99]

thinking caps on again please everyone

i have a pc i want to set up windows 2000 on this machine. so i put the cd in the cd drive and set bios to boot up from it and it should work rite? well it did before and it worked on my other pcs! but no it dont work for me now! im sure the cd is bootable im very very sure but it wont boot up it will go past bios then say 'media test failure' something like pxe81 check cable!! but my cables r fine!

so i thought id get a floppy disk with cd rom support, i did so i got to command prompt getting there is fine. then i type in d:/ then i type in dir then i see something called setup.exe and i type in cd setup.exe and what happens? i think it says 'cant be run in dos' or something of the sort.

so rite i go on the internet look for 'windows 2000 setup disks' four of the beauties i make the disks and put these into the pc i want to set up windows 2000 on . i get past bios fine and then it says ' setup is inspecting your harddware setup' then it says some i/o error and 'ntdetect' also with an error code.

so ive got to the point where both my harddrive and cdrom drivers are definetly accesible via dos and so is my floppy.

but im lost, i dont know how i can setup w2k now? does any1 have any ideas? im just lost lost lost big time! i got a new 10gb harddrive today just for this system.

please any thoughts or suggestions appreciated
thanks for reading

 

[Me__2001]

is ntdetect on the boot disk? if it is try downloading the debug version, i dont really know much about installing from floppies

 

[psd99]

is ntdetect on the boot disk? if it is try downloading the debug version, i dont really know much about installing from floppies

i used the windows 2000 cd on my other pc to make the 4 bootup setup disks. i had to go to run and type in this command that i found from the net.

i dont know what ndetect is and i dont know if its on there do u know what it is?

 

[Me__2001]

from what i just read on the microsoft site its something to do with detecting the hardware configuration.

 

[psd99]

from what i just read on the microsoft site its something to do with detecting the hardware configuration.

yes cheers i worked that out but im not sure what im doing wrong!!!
its annoying me so much that im pulling my hair out here!!

 

[Me__2001]

could there be a problem with the bios?

 

[psd99]

i havent tried resetting the bios just yet but i could try doing that
thanks

 

[muckshifter]

Try an 80wire cable, if your CDROM is slave to the HD put it on its own IDE, make sure the BIOS is set to 'auto detect' all drives.

 

[psd99]

Try an 80wire cable, if your CDROM is slave to the HD put it on its own IDE, make sure the BIOS is set to 'auto detect' all drives.

thanks for the reply. wat do u mean by 80wire cable?
at the minute the devices are as thus:

primary master : Harddisk
secondary master : cd rom

they r both on masters on seperate ide channels. but im not 100% sure which one is primary master or secondary master.does it matter? autodetect tpo all drives , i will checkt this.

i just tried with the floppy disks the error is just after 'setup is inspecting your hardware configuration then it goes: NTDETECT failed i/o error.

any more suggestions?

 

[muckshifter]

80-wire ATA 133 cable

It's what connects the HD/CD drives to the MB

 

[psd99]

of course! that ide cable looks indentical to the one im using on the harddrive ide channel!

 

[psd99]

yes cracked it! managed to install windows 2000 pro last nite.
way around it?

just changed the ide channels around swapping one for the other! strange isnt it?
cheers for your help.

 

[muckshifter]