Hi guys

I am trying to reinstall Windows XP either on to a SATA drive or an old IDE drive. The CD Rom can be seen from Windows XP at the moment and works fine but when I reboot with the XP CD in nothing happens. I have changed the boot settings so that the CD is first.

Any advice you could throw my way would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Paul

During the initial post you'll usually see options like 'Delete - Enter BIOS' or 'F4 - Network Boot'. There's also usually an option that says something like 'F8 - Boot Menu'. If you do see something like that then press the corresponding key.

That should bring up a menu loaded with all the devices that you can boot from. Select the optical drive that has your XP media and see if it works. And watch your drive lights to see if it's trying to access the media.

Also, maybe check the XP disc to see if maybe there's some fingerprints or something else on the read surface that's keeping it from being read properly.

Most of the time, but not always, it's F8/ F9/ F11 or F12. Also, perhaps you could try the cd with your friends' pc and see if it works or not

Don't forget it could be ESC as well.

Thanks guys

I will give it another go over the weekend.

Finally got to the root of the problem. Went through the F keys until I found the one that gave the boot order and there was no CD drive to be found!!! The drive was very old, about 10 years so i can only assume the motherboards bios didn't recognise it. Brought a new DVD writer and everything is now fine.

Thanks for your advice.