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#16
wytboy55

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how many cd drives do you have on the computer? if you have two cd drives, try to insert it to the other one.
Also try to remove the CMOS battery for 20 seconds and put it back in. After that, reset the bios to defaults, then set the boot priority again to cd as the first boot sequence. Save the BIOS settings. This is to make sure there are no other settings that are preventing us to boot from the cd. Try to boot from the cd again. Wipe the back of the cd also to make sure it's reading the cd correctly.
What brand of your computer you are using? there are computers like DELL and HP that has PC restore feature.
what it does is to reset the computer back to factory settings. It's like having the computer out of the box again. It's saved in a partition in the hard drive called recovery. But it depends on what year you bought them. Because these features on the computer started i late 2004.
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#17
Ztruker

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Your CD ix XP SP1, you have XP SP2 on your hard drive. You cannot do a Repair Install with that setup. You need to create anew XP CD slipstreamed with SP2, then you can do the Repair Install if that is what you want to do.

The simplest way to create a Bootable Windows XP Pro or Home Installation CD Slipstreamed with SP2 is to use Autostreamer. You point to your XP Pro/Home CD, the SP2 Service Pack .exe file, give it a path to write the .iso file to and off it goes. In 5 or 10 minutes you have a .iso file that you can burn to CD with almost any CD burner program you want to use. I used Roxio 7. There is a good freeware burner called DeepBurner which will do this also.

Here is the link to Autostreamer:
http://www.softpedia...ostreamer.shtml

You can download the SP2 .exe here:
http://www.microsoft...;displaylang=en

An excellent alternative is nLite. It allows you to merge SP1/SP2/Windows Updates into a new XP CD image that you can install from. Takes a bit of fiddling with but worth the effort since it also allows you to pre-answer all the questions asked during install so all you have to do is boot the new CD, select where you want to install, format or not and go to lunch. When you come back the install is finished and your are at the latest Service Pack and Update level. See here:
http://www.nliteos.com/

Use this site to get the MS updates:
http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/

You can also get updates from an MS site but it takes more work:
http://windowsxp.mvp...saveupdates.htm

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#18
wytboy55

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i think he just now wants to do a clean installation and he that should work because he will have to format the hard drive and delete all the partitions.
He just cant boot from the cd.

Edited by wytboy55, 01 February 2008 - 10:32 PM.

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#19
Ztruker

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If you can't boot from CD, the CD could be defective, or the IDE cable connecting to to the mother board could be defective or not firmly seated.

How many CD/DVD dries do you have, how are they connected on the IDE cable (which one is attached to which connector) and how are they jumpered (CS, Slave, Master)?
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#20
acotyledon

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I have one CD writable drive adn 1 dvd readable drive. I do not know what the IDE cable is.

Edited by acotyledon, 02 February 2008 - 12:03 PM.

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#21
Ztruker

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Do you have any friends who are more familiar with computers? If so, this might be a good time to ask for some assistance.

I can try to give you step by step instructions but it involves opening up the computer case and removing the cables that connect the CD and DVD drives to the mother board and checking the jumper settings on each them. If you want to tackle this by yourself then let me know and I'll try to give you complete instructions.
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#22
acotyledon

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Thank you but no. I used autostreamer and burned an .iso file on cd but am still unable to boot from cd. Was unable to copy the nlite file that I saved to cd onto the computer. I got an erro message "Invlaid MS-Dos function.

Thanks so much for your help though.

Edited by acotyledon, 02 February 2008 - 02:19 PM.

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#23
acotyledon

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I was finally able to boot from cd and reinstalled windows. Thanks everyone for your help.
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#24
Ztruker

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Glad you got it fixed. Sorry I was not able to provide any useful help to you on this one though. Good luck.
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#25
acotyledon

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You did help. You got through the process of elimination until I was able to find out what worked I really appreciate it.
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#26
Ztruker

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Thanks, Sounds like one of Sherlock Holmes' lines:

“We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

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