[toguy]

Hey everyone, I've spent a very frustrating day at home trying to fix my PC. I decided to reinstall windows and have encountered problems.

My system is as follows:
Dell Dimension 5500, desktop
- currently only have a 30g IDE hard drive in there; once I get the O/S up and running, I'll reinstall my SATA drive
- I'm using a windows XP pro cd to reinstall

So I boot to the CD and partition my hard drive then begin the setup. Windows copies the files to the HD and then it needs to restart.

Here is my issue - when it restarts, it goes right back into the Setup Utility and wants me to go through the same steps I just went through.

I've searched around on the forum but can't seem to find anyone with the exact same issue. I figure it could be an issue with my BIOS making the system boot to the CD again but I've tried to fix it with no luck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

[Spyderturbo007]

When it reboots, can you enter the BIOS and make sure it's still detecting the HDD? When XP finishes copying everything to memory, it adds a line to the boot.ini file telling the PC to boot from the HDD and finish setup. For some reason, it sounds like the PC isn't seeing the HDD and therefore not reading the boot.ini file so it can continue the installation.

[toguy]

Thanks for the reply! I'll check that out when I get home tonight.

[rshaffer61]

Are you leaving the installation disk in the cd drive when it reboots?

[toguy]

I am. It didn't say anything about removing it but that definately sounds like it could work. Will also give that a go when I get home.

Thanks!

[rshaffer61]

This is why it continues to boot to the cdrom as it is set to look at the cdrom first for the information.

[toguy]

Woohoo! I pulled the CD out prior to the reboot and it worked.

I'm sure the other suggestion would have worked as well.

Thanks for the assistance all

[rshaffer61]

System back up and running now?
Is there any other issue we need to address like drivers?