Unique reinstallation problem

[Amanda]

I have been to forums and no one seems to have a solution
for this, google dosent even have the keywords for my
problem now. LOL Let see if you guys have any ideas. I
have a toshiba laptop with no floppy or cd drive, so when
I format and reinstall I use an external CDR. I formatted
the hard drive after some trouble, it never wants to boot
from cd even after i edit the BIOS, and now when I boot
from CD with the XP boot disk I get this:

intel undi, pxe-2.0 (build 077)
PXE-E61: Media Test Failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exisiting Intel PXE ROM
NTLDR is missing

of course all i can do is restart, there is no dos prompt.
The external drive is connected via USB and is secure. The
NTDLR message is from formatting I assume. So I am in a
reboot cycle and cannot seem to get it to do anything off
CD. Any ideas?

 

[David Candy]

It trying to boot from the network card. Normally you have to press a key else it skips the card.

 

[Amanda]

I removed the wifi card from the PCMCI slot. I dont know
how else to bypass booting from the network card.

-----Original Message-----
It trying to boot from the network card. Normally you

have to press a key else it skips the card.message news:[email protected]...

 

[Bruce J. Weiers]

I think what it amounts to, is that the computer is trying to do what is
sometimes called a network boot -- that is, in the absence of a bootable
harddrive, it is looking over the network card for a server to boot
from. This, of course, is not useful to you, since, I presume, you
don't have a network server.

Does the BIOS indicate the possibility of booting to a USB device? Many
machines do not have this capability.

It may not be very satisfactory, but I know this course of action will
work: take the harddrive out of the laptop, and install in a desktop
machine as a secondary drive. (You can get an adapter widget from a
computer store to allow you to plug in the desktop's IDE and power
cables to the laptop harddrive's interface; it will cost about $7.)
Format the laptop harddrive as FAT32, and copy the system files to make
it a bootable DOS drive. Then, copy the installation files from a WinXP
installation disc. Put the laptop harddrive back in the laptop, boot to
DOS, and from the commandline, initiate the WinXP installation using the
files already copied to the harddrive.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I think what it amounts to, is that the computer is trying to do what is
sometimes called a network boot -- that is, in the absence of a bootable
harddrive, it is looking over the network card for a server to boot
from. This, of course, is not useful to you, since, I presume, you
don't have a network server.

Does the BIOS indicate the possibility of booting to a USB device? Many
machines do not have this capability.

But quite a lot provide for booting over a network - ie from something
connected to the Ethernet port. Hitting the correct key at power on
should give BIOS options to change boot order. For installation of XP
you want to boot CD then Hard disk. The ntldr is the first stage boot
loader for XP, so I suspect the position is currently CD - network - HD

 

[Bruce J. Weiers]

But quite a lot provide for booting over a network - ie from something
connected to the Ethernet port. Hitting the correct key at power on
should give BIOS options to change boot order. For installation of XP
you want to boot CD then Hard disk. The ntldr is the first stage boot
loader for XP, so I suspect the position is currently CD - network -
HD

The original poster indicated that she has no floppy drive, the she was
using an external USB-connected CD-drive, that she had reformatted the
harddrive, and that she had already tried altering the BIOS settings.

I surmise that she does have CD first in the boot order, because she
reported that she had modified BIOS settings, and that the harddrive has
no bootable system files, because she reported formatting the drive.
She might well have a boot order,
CD - HD - FD - network.

If she could boot from the CD, she would not have been posting to the
group. Putting the HD forward in the boot order, assuming that it does
not already precede network, is not going to help, because there are no
system files there to boot.