[my poor computer]

My old hard drive went bad so I bought a new one, I am trying to install windows xp pro sp2 since it is a clean hard drive. First I hooked it up as a secondary hard drive with a friends computer and from there I re-formatted it and partitioned it then marked the partition as active. For some reason, even when the BIOS is configured to boot from cd I get the error boot failure: System Halted. So I downloaded a windows xp bootable floppy disk but I get an error message telling me to insert a different cd. So I hook up a USB floppy drive and it asks for the floppy disk and it takes, but once I load all six disks I get the Blue Screen of death saying that I have an unmountable boot volume! How can I get a windows operating system on my new hard drive? Also can anyone think of why I cannot boot to cd?

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Hi my poor computer...

First, what kind of cd do you have...OEM or Retail?

Are you saving the settings when you change the boot priority to boot from cd in BIOS? Do you have a disk that came with the Hard Drive or a Win98 Startup diskette?

wannabe1

[wannabe1]

Hi my poor computer...

First, what kind of cd do you have...OEM or Retail?

Are you saving the settings when you change the boot priority to boot from cd in BIOS? Do you have a disk that came with the Hard Drive or a Win98 Startup diskette?

wannabe1

[my poor computer]

Actually neither... I am a comp sci major in college and we get windows for free so they let us burn a copy of windows from our network. I have this type of cd before for my original hard drive so I got a new cd and product number from my professor so that shouldn't be a problem.

Also yes I am saving the BIOS settings, I double checked when I re-started and cd-rom was still my first bot priority. The HDD came with no disk because I bought it off e-bay. And lastly I have a 98 boot disk but I am lost in what to do with it. I tried switching to my cd drive which it let me do and then changed to the i386 folder, then I ran winnt. Here the problem occurred. I don't have smartdrv.exe (nor do I know how to obtain it) so I followed the prompts and continued anyway. Here I was told that it could not find enough disk space to temporarily store the files necessary for the boot. *sigh* Does that help at all?

[wannabe1]

I think the best way to approach this will be to "blank" the drive using the Win98 startup disk and then let the WinXP cd do the whole format.

Restart with the Win98 Startup disk in the floppy drive. When presented with the Options Screen, press Shift + F5 for Command Prompt. You will see the A:\ prompt...type fdisk and press "Enter".

On the next screen type Y to enable large disk support.

In the "FDISK Options" screen, use option 3 to delete the partition and press "Enter" (You may be prompted to accept the deletion...accept it.) and press "Enter" then press "Esc" to return to the "FDISK Options" screen. Choose option 1 to "Create DOS partition or Logical DOS drive" and press enter..again, accept the change. Press "Esc" to exit fdisk.

Now insert the WinXP cd in the drive and press "Ctrl + Alt + Delete" to restart the machine and see if it will boot to the cd and give you the option to partition and format the drive. If you are able to start the format operation in this way, use the full format option, not the quick format...and format to NTFS.

Let me know how this goes...

[my poor computer]

First of all thanks a lot for the help, I really appreciate it.

Secondly, when I delete the partition using fdisk there is no problem, when I choose to create a DOS partition I am assuming that I must create a primary partition as I cannot do an extended or logical without a primary. So I created a primary DOS partition, when it is finished checking my drive it asked if I wanted to use the maximum available size for a Primary DOS Partition and make the partition active. I said yes. After it is finished I get a message saying "You MUST restart your system for your changes to take effecy. Any drives you have created or changed must be formatted AFTER you restart. Shut down Windows before restarting."

Now I am assuming that this is the point where you suggested I put in the xp cd and Ctrl+Alt+Delete to re-start. I get the same result upon re-starting, "Boot Failure: System Halted". I don't know if I did something wrong or if this simply did not work. Any other ideas?

[wannabe1]

Is the boot priority in BIOS st to boot from the cd-rom first? Are you seeing the prompt "Press any key to boot from cd" and then pressing a key to boot from the cd?

[my poor computer]

Yes my BIOS is set to boot from cd-rom first. To make sure that is the case I set it to boot only to cd-rom and disabled all other boot options. When I start my computer I see no prompt for "press any key to boot from cd" but oddly enough if I don't press any keys at all I don't even get a prompt to get into BIOS. When the computer starts there is a stupid blue "INTEL Inside Pentium 4" image. When I hold F2 the text pops up with my computer specs and says entering setup where the prompt is supposed to be. In light of this I tried holding a random key to see if it wasn't displaying the "press any key to boot from cd" prompt; when I do this the computer specs are displayed as well as the prompts, but above the prompt for entering the BIOS it says "keyboard error" for only a moment and then continues on to my boot failure problem. *Sigh*

[my poor computer]

I don't know if it matters or not but when I check the IDE configuration, under advanced options in my BIOS, It says that my cd-rom is listed as secondary IDE Master. It labels the disk as CDU5211. Like I said I don't know if it matters or not. Thanks.

[wannabe1]

In most systems, this is the way it should be..the HDD will be Primary Master, the cd-rom will be Secondary Master. Any subsequent drives will be shown as slaves.

Download and create the WinXP Bootdisk set. Get the set for your XP installation...the links are about half way down the page. This will require 6 formatted floppy diskettes. Download the file to your desktop, double click on the downloaded file, and start feeding it floppy disks.

Once you've created this set, insert disk 1 into the machine and follow the prompts to install the setup files. While the machine loads disk 1, insert the XP cd, but don't close the tray until all 6 diskettes have loaded. See if this gets us past the crash zone and you can enter the XP setup.

[my poor computer]

Hey, I tried this a number of times to make sure that I had the timing right and was loading the cd while the cmoputer was loading the first floppy, but I am still encountering the same error. Any other suggestions are more than welcome but I have a feeling ideas on this subject are running low, hopefully there are still more things to try. Please let me know, and thanks again.

[wannabe1]

What is listed in the BIOS as the Primary Master?

[dsenette]

just as a "try this and see if she goes" kind of deal....instead of holding down a random key (which will always cause a keyboard failure) as soon as teh power starts up on the machine (with the cd in the drive) start pressing the space bar once a second untill you see the press any key to boot from cd ( or it enters setup) or you get an error..

[my poor computer]

Primary IDE master displays the model number of my hard drive: ST3200826A

Also, dsenette it was a good suggestion, I hadn't tried that but unfortunately no dice.

I don't understand how something as simple as installing windows can get this complicated!
I appreciate the help though.

[my poor computer]

Hey,

I haven't heard anything for a while, I was just wondering if there was any progress being made on my situation. If there is no solution in sight then are there any suggestions as to what I should do from here? Buy a new version of windows xp, buy a hard drive with windows already installed....anything? Thanks for your patience.

[wannabe1]

Let's see if you can format the drive with fdisk.

Boot the Machine with a Win98se startup diskette. At the options screen, press Shift + F5 for command prompt. At the A:\ prompt, type format c: /s and press "Enter".

Then try to boot to the installation cd again.

I'll admit...this is a confusing one...