Boot

[DarrenToogood]

Hello,

Yesterday I went and purchased a new WD HDD. I installed it fine, and had vista working a treat. I started to format my old HDD, however cancelled this as it was going to take too long, and run on into the night. My computer was running fine.

I shut the computer down last night, and when I turned it on this morning, all I got was:

'Insert a bootable device' - eventhough I had two HDDs in there. One which was partly formated, and one which was working fine only 10 hours before.

I proceeded to burn a OS disk on my Laptop, and when I boot from the CD, all I get is: 'DEVICE DRIVER NOT FOUND: MSC001 NO VALID CDROM DEVICE DRIVERS SELECTED'. I am at a loss about what to do....

I have all my data backed up to my external HDD, so that is not a concern. Should I maybe install Vista on my external HDD using another computer, and then boot my main PC from the external, allowing me to then freshly format my other two hardrives, and then install Vista on them, then wiping vista from my external hardrive?

[GeekSRV]

Sounds like a messed up MBR, this link should help http://askbobrankin.com/fix_mbr.html

[Berch]

Hey,

Just incase have you tried un-plugging the hard drive that was partly formatted and leaving the one with vista on it in and booting up.

What are you hard drives and dvd drive? (SATA, IDE)

[Stephen!]

Just incase have you tried un-plugging the hard drive that was partly formatted and leaving the one with vista on it in and booting up.

Yes, try this.

[DarrenToogood]

SATA, which is a bummer as no other computer in the house is.

I tried installing XP, and now all I am getting is 'Error loading operating system'.


Sometimes it is saying the CMOS settings are wrong, and to press F1 to setup.

[Berch]

Does it give you the option to boot from CD than give you the error or just display the error straight away.

If it comes up straight away without giving you the option to boot from disc try going into your BIOS and setting the first boot device as your disc drive rather than your hard drive and rebooting and see if it will let you boot from disc that way.

[DarrenToogood]

I pressed F8, got onto the Windows XP disk, formatted the drive, installed XP, and then it restarted the system. Now, without pressing anything, it comes up 'press any key to boot from cd' and after 3 seconds, additionally displays 'Error loading operating system'.

What do I do :S?

[Agnostic Bear]

Western Digital

Found your problem.

[DarrenToogood]

I am finally getting somewhere with this.

I have removed the NEW HDD, and plugged the old HDD back in. I am now installing Windows XP on the old HDD.

I think the hardrive will be going back to PC World.