Windows XP Home Ed. won't boot

Hi, I had a co-worker bring me her computer, it keeps rebooting. DIT said they were just gunna reformatt her HD. She had files she didn't want to lose so I went through safe boot and was able to reteive them. OK now with precious files saved I'm gonna reformatt the HD but the system is not seeing the OS disk in the cd drive as a bootable disk or something. It just keeps booting to Windows which fails and it trys to reboot. Any suggestions?

 

You will need to enter "Setup" and change the boot sequence so that the cd-rom drive is listed before the HD. Normally there is a certain key or key combination to allow you to get into setup. Look for it on the initial screen you see when booting. Press it immediately after the screen fades.

Plan B
If you can't pull that off for some reason, you can do the deed by booting to this XP boot floppy and installing from there. Download the file to your Desktop and run it while you have a blank floppy in the drive bay. It will create the necessary boot floppy for your install. Boot with it in the bay on the machine you are installing on and follow the screen directions.

 

Did that the sequence is floppy, cd rom, hdd.

 

That should have worked so go to plan B. Sometimes the cd-rom just won't see the disk at boot like we hope.

 

Tried to use my copy of XP Pro. Thinking maybe bad disk but nothing. Went back and restored defaults nothing. Plan F - throw it in the trash?? lol

 

please go on surferdude

 

Looks like the boot floppy will be your saviour. Read the earlier post again. #2

 

I got the screen make note of drive letterr etc. Navigate to i386 on cd. drive letter is R: so at the A: I need to cd r:\ correct?

 

Nope, just type R: then type cd i386 Then type winnt

Pressing enter after each.

 

From the screen directions:

Do I have to come out there and choke you?

 

surferdude2 I really appreciate your help but I gotta give up for today. I get the R:\ prompt I type in cd i386 and get the cdr101: not ready reading drive r: message

 

Do you have the install CD in the drive bay? If so, your cd-rom drive may be hosed.

 

I'm sorry! yes r: (enter) gets me thr R:\ prompt cd i386 (enter) gets me the error message

 

yeah there are two cd drives and i've been trying it in both. I gotta sleep on it I really do appreciate the help though!!!

 

Ok, give it a rest if you like. It sounds like the cd-rom drive is being recognized but will not read the disk. You could try other disks to verify that. The cure would be getting a new drive.