Help Needed System Won't Boot Vista CD

Greetings Geeks -

After a nasty virus infection (thanks to my wife) I decided to just reinstall the OS. I had all sorts of schizophrenic gremlins merely formatting and partitioning the HD. After that fiasco, I have yet another problem . . .

My system refuses to boot the Vista setup CD. It will boot other discs, including the Ultimate Boot CD I made. I have tried all manner of tricks with no luck. I know the disc is in good working order, as it will boot my laptop.

My particular DVD RW has given me occasional problems. I attribute those to Vista though, it would seem to recognize a newly inserted disc at leisure, and sometimes not at all. As I stated, I think that particular problem was an OS/system issue, not a hardware issue. But it is certainly muddying the waters at the moment.

Here is my setup:

AMD 5600 X2
2 Gig O' Ram
Asus M2V-MX SE MB
American Megatrends v02.58 BIOS
Target HD is a 75 Gig WD
I can't remember the particular DVD drive model, it is set as a primary slave to the boot disk
And at the moment, I am three beers into this mess . . . .

My next avenue of attack will be to try to run the setup.exe on the Vista disc. However, I am not sure exactly how I can do that. I think I might need to trick the system - insert a bootable cd, boot, remove it, and through DOS run "run setup.exe."

Does anyone have any other suggestions? I am at wits end here.

I will say it was/is fun busting out some old-school DOS stuff! Thanks for any help.

 

If you are picking dvd rom in your boot menu, and it boots from other dvds, its either a bad disc or a bad reader, no tricks here. ed

 

You can go into the files and run exe or setup, and it will run and reboot, it might save your old windows in a folder named as such, and maybe it wont, but it should if it can read the disc. ed

 

If it will not read your disc, and you can access a writing program on another computer, you could download and burn the iso of a startup disc from here.

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/


Burning it to a disc you know it will read, and as it starts ,access repair mode and in the command prompt, type
bootrec /fixmbr (to write a master boot record), and press enter
then type in
bootrec /fixboot (to create a new boot sector/loader)
This would ensure that you have not got a boot virus.
Hope that will help

 

Thanks for all the replies Geeks -

I just went out and bought a new DVD/CD RW. It is an LG 24x, and it started the disc right up.

I did have a boot disk - I had previously worked on my brother-in-laws computer and I had to make one so I made a copy of the "Ultimate Boot Disc."
I suggest this disc to anyone, especially us Geeks. It is an very useful tool. My rig is three years old, and does not have a boot to USB option, or I would have tried that.

All the better though - I think my old NEC drive was piece of plastic and metal waste. I always seemed to have trouble with it. My new drive is ATA too, the old one was IDE.

So, I am installing Vista now. Thanks again for the replies.