cyclones9

Hello,

I am fixing someone's ATEC Desktop Computer and they want me to do a full clean and reinstall of the Operating System.. I stuck the WinXP CD in teh drive and restarted it and then it booted but it didnt reconize the CD.. The boot order is set to CD Rom Boot first and still didnt do it.. I did the F7 at startup to manually boot it and it still didnt boot from disc.. Any suggestions?

__________________
~Brandon~
Emachines
Intel Celeron 2.80GHz
512 MB - Upgrading to 512MB
80GB HD
FreeAgent 250gb Exteral Hard Drive
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 4000
LG DVD Writer/ROM Drive
LOGITECH KEYBOARD AND GE MOUSE 1.1
OS: Win XP Home Edition

PC eye

There's a few things to consider there. One would be to first inspect the disk to see what shape that is in like seeing finger marks or scratches. The optical drive there may need a good lens cleaning or may have gone?

See if the installer on another software disk will start up even though you can only go so far that will show if the drive is still good. Another thought is the drive's cable if that is slightly unplugged or simply needs replacing. If that's a flat ribbon type on an older system it's probably dryed out and not seeing full signal transfer.

__________________
Turning the Tongue into a Device Controller
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Sma...ory?id=5647175

Is EBay going out of the Auction Business?
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5626840&page=1

meanman

you could try putting first second and 3rd boot device to cdrom and see if that works,if it does just remember when windows has installed to chang the boot order.

__________________
my sig
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient 95W Edition ocd to 3.15 ghz
Abit IP35 Pro (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix 4GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 1066MHz
EVGA GeForce 9800 GX2 "SSC Edition" 1024MB GDDR3
CoolerMaster Stacker 832
Coolermaster 700W ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU
member of the cod 4 www.cfclan.co.uk

PC eye

On some boards like Asus models in particular you can get away with assigning the first as hard drive and simply use the F8 option fuond on the first post screen to select the drive type as well as drive to boot from. That's comes in handy to force the boot from a specific hard drive set as first in the order once the installer copies all setup files and restarts the system.

While that's an easy way to see Windows boot up for the first time in order to see the installation completed the problem the drive or disk is suspect. You may have to go into the bios and load the defaults or even replace the battery on the board itself if that is weak.

On the new build here a brand new cd writer refused to install softwares at first. The board turned out to be the problem when it quit after the first 3 days of use. That or a corrupted bios is also something to consider. You may have to simply update the bios itself if the drive can be tested on another system.

__________________
Turning the Tongue into a Device Controller
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Sma...ory?id=5647175

Is EBay going out of the Auction Business?
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5626840&page=1