Installing XP Problem

Hi, i have been working on upgrading my laptop because the hard drive failed and it need a liot of other things. I bought a new hard drive and put it in. I got windows XP Pro and put the disk in and started the computer up. It gets to the part where it boots and it says "No boot sector on hard disk - No bootable devices--strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility." i then went to my desktop and made an ms dos boot disk. I tried this and got the normal prompt, only it was on drive A:. I tried to get it to drive C:, but it tells me "Invalid drive specification." It wont let me format c either. Got any ideas? I cant do fdisk either.

 

I think the reason that it is saying that the boot sector is not found is because the computer is trying to boot off the hard drive and since there is no operating system installed, the computer wants a bootdisk or or on some computers, they just restart when you press any key.

In order to solve this problem, you must first go into the BIOS and set the computer to boot off the CD. If it is already set to boot off the CD, change the order that the different drives boot up. Ex: D,C,A

After that you should be able to start up and enter the Windows XP setup after pressing any key when prompted to so. After you finish setup, you should be able to start normally again, but you may want to switch the boot order of the drives back to the way they were before.

 

I tired that, still no go.

 

If you set it to boot off of CD, what happened?

 

Go to the BIOS and set the cd drive as the first boot device. Now u need to format and make partitions on ur hard disk with d help of d fdisk command. If the cd u r using is not bootable den nothing is going to work. Make sure dat u have d bootable installation cd.

 

I set the cd drive as the the first, and tried setting it as the only one. Neither worked. How do you get to a command prompt to do fdisk? I tried an ms-dos boot disk and when i try to go to C: it says invalid drive specification, and wont let me do fdisk from A: What else can i do?

 

Okie so i tell u all from d very beginning. Suppose u have just brought the new harddisk and want to put the os in it. The first thing u do is to make d partitions on the hard disk and format those partitions. After dat only u can load the operating system on ur hard disk. SO here it goes..We have many type of file systems by which we can format our hard disk..like FAT16, FAT32 N NTFS. If ur drives are already with FAT32 partition and u are booting ur pc by DOS bootable cd den that d cd wont detect the FAT32 PARTITIONS AND D MESSAGE "DRIVE ISNT ACCESIBLE" will appear. So not a big problem there. All u need is a "XP INSATLLATION CD THAT IS BOOTABLE (ALL CDS ARENT BOOTABLE)...Now boot ur pc by makind the cd drive as first boot device. If u are getting a: promt den u sure have booted from d cd.Type fdisk and partition and format ur harddisk. If fdisk isnt working on d promt den it either means that d fdisk command on d cd is corrupted ....or else u (for d kind of erroe message u said ur machine is displaying)...u better get a 98 bootable or 2000 bootable cd and use fdisk command from dat...partition and format ur harddisk..and after dat try for d installation of xp pro..i hope all i have written will be of some help..write back..happy computin!!

 

Thanks, I found the cd was not a bootable cd, so i installed 2000 and tried to install xp, but when it asks you to restart the firt time everything crashes and you have to start it all over again. I think i am going to stick with 2000 for now though, so thanks for your help!

 

As far as I know, All XP CD's are bootable, that is of course all legal non pirated versions!

 

Okie...it was gud to know dat u finally got over it all. If u still wish to install d Xp pro..den install win 98 and den upgrade to xp...anyways happy computing and have a gr8 time!!