WinXP issues - Help

I'm trying to resurrect a 12 year old HP Pavilion desktop PC with the following specs:
HP Pavilion A350N
Intel Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz
2GB RAM
160 GB hard drive (on the verge of dying)
The system is all IDE and PATA and uses 40-wire ribbon cable.

Here's the problem:
I want to replace the original hard drive with a new hard drive and install a fresh copy of Windows XP Home Premium. I have a couple genuine Windows operating system cd's but none of them will boot up.
I keep getting the following error message: "Insert Boot media in selected Boot device and press a Key".

Here's what I've tried:
I've gone into BIOS numerous times and carefully configured boot sequence so the optical drive boots first. I save the BIOS settings, exited and rebooted.

I tried THREE different optical drives and all have failed to boot the cd.

Since I'm able to change the boot order, I assume the BIOS recognizes each optical drive. Despite that, I tried various combinations of ribbon cables, including a good ribbon cable from a different pc.

I've tried all combination of jumper settings.

I thought the BIOS wasn't remembering the changes, so I installed a brand new cmos battery on the mobo.

I know the cd's work, because I'm able to launch them in a different PC.

Now, the original hard drive won't boot. I'm getting the following error message:
windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: windows\system32\config\system.
The work-around to solve this error message requires installation of the Windows Operating System cd, which ironically will not load. haha...

* So what the heck is the problem?
Could there be something wrong with the mobo?

* How would I troubleshoot hardware problems on the board?

* What about the BIOS? I'm not getting any bad BIOS checksum errors, but could it be corrupted?

HELP!!!

they are older IDE optical drives? chances are you will need to run one of those laser cleaning disks through it, i have resurrected many old optical drives from this method

wagex said:

they are older IDE optical drives? chances are you will need to run one of those laser cleaning disks through it, i have resurrected many old optical drives from this method

Click to expand...

These optical drives were tested in a different PC and they booted the Windows OS cd's, so I'd guess that isn't the issue, but thanks for the reply.

Here's what to do.

Extract this zip file, extract it instead of double clicking on files inside unextracted zip file.


Instructions on how to Integrate AHCI drivers are in there, they allow installation of Windows XP on newer systems.
Read up on what's inside. Consider integrating ALL Windows XP updates ever officially released through Windows XP SP4 [unofficial] and make a bootable USB to have a system ready to go upon finishing the installation with ALL updates installed.

I was so close to throwing this pc in the dumpster.
However, I obtained a 3rd WinXP os cd a few hours ago.
For whatever reason, the first two cd's failed to boot.
This one booted and I just finished the install process.
Now I'm downloading SP3. Yeah!!

Thanks for your patience.

One issue might be the cmos battery. If that is low, then booting might be hit and miss on an old computer. Have you replaced that battery?

? You can boot without the battery, can't you? Doesn't it just serve the purpose of retaining BIOS values in case the power goes out?

c627627 said:

? You can boot without the battery, can't you? Doesn't it just serve the purpose of retaining BIOS values in case the power goes out?

Click to expand...

If the CMOS battery is marginal, then sometimes values get changed in the BIOS randomly and so you boot up one time and all is fine, the next time you boot it won't recognize the boot drive or the CD drive is gone, or maybe the ports are changed etc.

I had this happen once with an old laptop. I couldn't complete the installation of windows because upon reboot, bios values had changed and then when I booted into the bios, they changed again. Finally I realized it was a battery problem - and all proceeded normally after I got a new battery installed - which wasn't easy because of course the laptop took a special battery which I had to have made at a local battery shop.

Basically you need that CMOS battery to maintain the info across reboots, or all sorts of problem can occur that are not easy to identify.

Right, because you have to have an uninterrupted power source to save the values, right?
So if that power source is the wall or the battery, as long as it is uninterrupted, the values should remain there, with computer OFF or ON... as long as the computer is connected to the wall and there is nothing wrong with power cable / power supply...

But the big picture is that you are right, if there is a minute interruption with the power cord, the values are gone because there is no battery to save them... If your laptop was not connected t the wall, you loose your values of course. But if it was 100% of the time connected to a working power source, then there was an interruption somewhere that caused the loss of your BIOS values... which should only happen if the laptop was unplugged from the wall.

c627627 said:

Right, because you have to have an uninterrupted power source to save the values, right?

Click to expand...

At least in my case, I never unplugged the laptop while doing an instal, but my windows installs still failed on reboot for some reason. Perhaps the line voltage powers the battery and not the CMOS directly. Then if the battery is failing it doesn't power the CMOS properly.