[AnthonyB]

I was given an Compaq Presario AMD Athalon 2400+ but no hard drive. I got a Western Digital Hard Drive that had previously been used in a hacked XBOX. I installed the hard drive and it and my CD are found in the bios settings which I set to have the CD boot first but then I get Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter. I know hard drive needs to be formatted but cant get Windows CD or the Data Lifeguards disk to boot.

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Several things, the hard drive and optical drives should be on different IDE cables, the HD set to cable select and connected with the 80 wire cable. Make sure the connectors are seated.

You can also get this error if an unbootable floppy is in the drive.

Using another computer and the Data Lifeguard disk you can make a diagnostics floppy and use it to write the HD to zeros. If you can't use a floppy you can make a diagnostic CD or run the diagnostics from the DL CD. You can also us Killdisk or Boot and Nuke to write the drive to zeros.

Is the windows CD one that was made for this machine? Also the original hard disk may have data on it that a generic disk won't have.

[Tyger]

Several things, the hard drive and optical drives should be on different IDE cables, the HD set to cable select and connected with the 80 wire cable. Make sure the connectors are seated.

You can also get this error if an unbootable floppy is in the drive.

Using another computer and the Data Lifeguard disk you can make a diagnostics floppy and use it to write the HD to zeros. If you can't use a floppy you can make a diagnostic CD or run the diagnostics from the DL CD. You can also us Killdisk or Boot and Nuke to write the drive to zeros.

Is the windows CD one that was made for this machine? Also the original hard disk may have data on it that a generic disk won't have.

[Old Goat]

You can download a utility from the WD site to clear and format your drive. I used it to fix a drive that wouldn't let me load the OS. Worked like a charm (4 hr download on dialup!)

[AnthonyB]

The drives are on separate cables, computer is XP processor which is system im using. I cant get the Data Lifeguard disk to run either though.

[AnthonyB]

Ok I got the floppy to work but when I run the diagnostic tools it comes up Fatal Error There was a device error reading drive 1 absolute sector 0 count.