Dont know if this is the proper section but here goes . Was telling mate at work about the great tech support on this forum & he said he had a prob with his pc . He is trying to reformat his hd , he goes into the bios & makes Cd rom first boot than restarts with XP disk the usual message comes up ( press any key to continue ) everytime it just boots back to windows , his drive is showing up ok in bios . His cd is accessable from windows & is working ok so no probs there . He recently updated his bios & this seems to have occured sinse then .

Ian

the usual message comes up ( press any key to continue )

What's the rest of the message? When you see that line, something else usually comes just before it telling you why you're seeing that message. We need to see that part too.

When resetting the BIOS boot sequence, does he use the Save Changes and Exit option? Changes in BIOS must be saved before they are made effective, otherwise it will ignore the CD ROM and boot to the hard drive as usual.

Yes he saved with f10 & the message is just the normal XP message Press any key to boot from CD , but does not boot from cd only straight back into Wiindows .

Ian

1.Have you tried to install windows on another computer using this CD? What happend could be due to the fact that your CD isn't BOOTABLE (this usualy happens when you just COPY an OS installation CD to another).

2.Did you deactivate the READ-ONLY MBR since installing requires rewritting MBR?


ADVICE: Before updating BIOS write down ALL BIOS options and their values so you wouldn't have surprises.

His XP cd is ok tried it on mine . question2 how do you deactivate Read only MBR ? cant imagine he would have done that anyway .

Ian

Hi,

You need to let us know what is the message.

Does your friend have WinXP installed on his harddrive. Just use a DOS disk to boot the system, run Fdisk, and the reformat the harddrive and you will be set to reinstall WinXP.

Fdisk is no problem mate but that does not answer why the pc has this error & as I have already stated there is no error message it just does not boot straight from cd rom.

Ian