Help Asap!!

Its not an emergency, but Id like to have some ideas before I get out of work at 5 which leaves 2 and a half hours....

so I built a computer for my cousin. He knows how to install windowz and all that junk, so I just put the hardware together for him. I just booted it into BIOS at my place, everything was fine, saw all his IDE devices perfectly.

NOW, I dropped it off at his place yesterday and he called me and said that windows wil not install. Heres exactly what he said:
"I will put the windows disk in, boot up the computer. It will read the disk and run though all the prelim stuff (ie formatting and copying system files), then it does that reboot and its SUPPOSED to continue installation and all that configuration stuff"....

"The problem is that I reboot and it reads the disk, and brings me back to the initialization screen where you have to formatt a drive and all that. Whats wrong??"

He has tried to boot without the CD after it formats and it tells him that no boot cartradige was found!

Anyone ever seen this? Its all on Windows XP btw. He even tried 2K with the same result! And I KNOW its good cause I JUST installed off the exact XP disk.

Im confident Ill get it figured out tonight, but like I said, Id like some ideas before I crack it open and take a look.

BTW..the hard drive is completely blank (no partitions made) and an ATA100 20GB on primary/slave config... The only thing I can think of is that it needs to be on the Primary/master?? I have a bootable hard drive on Primary/slave, I dont understand why he couldent.


Let me know what you think. Should be interesting. Ill tell ya what I find tom.

thanks!

You should have the OS disk on primary master. You can have a storage disk on primary slave, but even that is not ideal - you would be better to keep the second disk on secondary master.

Check the boot order in BIOS and ensure it is configured correctly.

Finally, if you still experience problem simplify the physical configuration and observe results... Only connect the primary master disc and a CD drive to load the disc. See how the install goes then.

try this:
when he first installs everything, he should boot from the cd. after the reboot, the computer should boot from the hard drive, but the disk should still be in the master cdrom. he'll have to change the boot settings in the bios when the computer reboots.

Yeah, manually changing the boot order between might work... But it shouldn't be necessary with a normal configuration.

yeah, usually is says "press any key to boot from cd"....just dont press anything

That depends on system and bios version... Not everyones system will say that, and I doubt that is his problem.

I've seen this issue before here, but I don't remember what exactly was done to resolve it.

And I KNOW its good cause I JUST installed off the exact XP disk.

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Dubbin1 said:

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Since when are you a cyber cop

ElectroX said:

Since when are you a cyber cop

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Since we are not allowed to discuss illegal activity here

Who said anything about it being illegal?? He never said he illegally used the same CD key, he could have purchased a corporate key

ChampsElysees said:

Who said anything about it being illegal?? He never said he illegally used the same CD key, he could have purchased a corporate key

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LOL Ok