Captain_parAnOia

Distinguished
Sep 11, 2005
2
0
18,510
Hey,

I am in the midst of building a computer. I got everything put together this morning and went to install Xp this afternoon, but I can't get the thing to boot to my CD drive. I configured BIOS like my motherboard manual said, set the BIOS boot order to boot to CD-Rom first, popped in the XP CD and rebooted. No Dice. Every time i start it, after it gives me the "hit DEL to enter BIOS" message, it goes to a "Intel UNDI" program, says something about my ethernet controller, and says "DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". I have tried putting the XP disk in at this point but it still won't work. The only think I can think of that might be causing this, is an "ESC for boot options" message that pops up when I start the PC. When I go to this menu, it says "Select a first boot device" and lists,

Removable
Hard Disk
CD-ROM

I cannot change the order of this list. I am assuming this is the boot order that the PC is using instead the the one in BIOS?


Thanks,

Lane
 

peartree

Distinguished
Sep 7, 2001
441
0
18,780
What you've got here is a basic panic attack.

When it says 'ESC for boot options', please do so. This should bring up that list you wrote about. Use your arrow keys to highlighCD-ROM and hit enter. At that point, it should boot the CD.

Most motherboards are that way. You can specify boot order all you want, but you still have to do something, from simply hitting any key to picking the actual boot drive from a list, in order to get it to boot from anything but the hard drive.

If all else fails(!),put a DOS floppy in the floppy drive and boot from that. Pick 'Boot with CD-ROM support from the options. When the command line comes up, switch to the CD-ROM drive and enter SETUP, then hit enter. That should get you going.



<font color=green>****</font color=green> Never Assume <font color=red>ANYTHING</font color=red> <font color=green>****</font color=green>