i bought a 40 gb western digital hard drive and when i hooked it up it gave me the 'operating system not found' message. i put in the xp pro cd and restarted and it gave me the same message. i went into the bios and set the cd-rw drive as #1 in the boot order. it still doesnt work. i tried switching out cables, changing the master/slave configuration; nothing works. i don't have another computer to hook the hard drive into or any money to take it somewhere to fix it. i'm sure everything's hooked up right, but it keeps bypassing the cd drive and trying to boot from the hard drive even though i changed the order in the bios. whats wrong with it?

--melanie

You probably don't have the drives jumpered correctly. You need to set the jumpers on the new HD to Master, and if you don't have another drive on the same cable set it to Master Alone. Did you remove the original HD? When booting to the Windows CD you may need to hit any key to boot from it. Pay attention as you will only have a few seconds to do this.

i have the hard drive and cdrw set to master. when the computer starts i get the start-up screen, immediately followed by the operating sys not found message. no screens between them...i can get into the bios, but ive been playing around with the settings forever...*sigh* its like the computer isn't recognizing my cd drive... i also tried using a startup disk at the recommendation of a friend, to get my cd drive working. then it gave me some random error so i gave up on that idea. im so confused

--melanie

forgot to mention-- i removed the old hard drive since it got fried =\

--melanie

If your CD and hard drive are both set to master on the same IDE cable, your computer will not see either one of them. The hard drive should be set to master on the primary IDE. Preferably your CD should also be set to master on the secondary IDE (separate cable). Alternatively the CD can be slave on the same IDE as the HDD.

theyre on different cables
any other ideas?
*by the way thanks for the quick replies

--melanie

The CD should autorun the XP install CD. Unless there is also a problem with the CDROM drive.

Why don't you try the boot disk again, and post back the error message you receive.

Also check in bios that both drives are correctly recognised.

Try you CD in a differt computer to make sure it is good and bootable. Also some computers have a boot menu key, sometimes F9 the boot menu key will over ride the Bios setings.

i dont have another computer.

the error i get when i use the boot disk says the drive is unpartitioned then it gives me possible reasons why it's not picking anything up. big long list...i ran fdisk and partitioned it then tryed again. it came up to an a:/ command prompt and it still wouldn't let me use a cd. im pretty sure the cd's okay because its brand new. might be something wrong with the cd drive?! i don't understand why though, it was working fine before my old hard drive screwed up. haven't tried the boot menu key thing yet, but i'm calling it a night and giving up for now. maybe tomorrow. if you guys think of anything else yet me know and ill try it sometime tomorrow =)

--melanie

You shouldn't need to partition the disk when installing XP as the installation program takes care of this.

If the boot disk has CD support, watch the screen when booting. In amongst all the gibberish, it will tell you which letter is assigned to the CD.

At the A:> prompt type the drive letter for the CDROM followed by a colon, then press enter. The prompt should change to x:> (x being whatever letter you got earlier). At this prompt type setup. This should begin the install routine.

I didn't read all the post above but if you set all three items to cdrom you will not have to hit any key to boot to cd.

Check both ends of the cable to the CD drive. You might have caused one of the ends to come loose when you were installing the new hard drive.

Try setting the w/d to cable sellect,ive had many issues with w/d's on master setting and setting them on c/s usually resolves the issues.

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