My friend just gave me a computer she no longer ever used it and saidi could have it for free. Its a pentium 3, like 900 or mhz, with 512 mb of ram and its an IBM. thats about all i know. When i first power it up, it shows an IBM logo and then it says press F12 to boot from network or F1 to get into BIOS the problem is no matter what option i choose it will always stop half way thru the Windows NT splash screen and give me a blue screen of death saying Inaccessible Boot Device error. I dont know what to do to get around this. I have a windows 2000 CD i luckily found. But no matter what i do i cant seem to boot off the CD DRIVE. Or even load the computer and fix it. I just want to REFORMAT and REINSTALL windows XP onto the computer. I dont need to save anything off the hard drive. Anyone got any help? I tried changing the Ribbon cable for the hard drive with my other Ribbon cable in my other computer which does work but i still get the Innaccessible Boot device error. I went into BIOS and tried changing the BOOT order, the only options i have to choose from are either HARD DISK (0) which im confused about shouldnt it be a 1 rather then a 0? i dont know. or i can choose NETWORK or i can choose CD ROM. But no matter what option i choose it always boots the same, giving me the IBM logo with the F12 or F1 option, no matter what i do or what option i try, it will still give me that blue screen of death. Even if i hit F8 on the splash screen, no matter what option i choose it will still give me the blue screen, iv tried all the SAFE MODE options and even the rest of them but still a blue screen of death. Every page i read about fixing this blue screen problem has something to do with editting some registry entries or this and that. BUT I CANT EVEN LOAD THE COMPUTER, so i have no way of fixing this according to most of the articles iv read online. All i want to do is REFORMAT and put windows xp on it. Anyone have any ideas or help on what i can do to fix this?? I thought maybe the hard drive and cd rom werent connected properly. so iv tried messing around with the order of the ribbon cables and all that. I got the CD ROM going straight to the SECONDARY IDE, and the HArd drive is connected to the PRimary IDE and then the floppy disk drive is connected to FDD connector or the middle one, only one left. but no matter how i tried or what order i try starting the computer it always gives me a blue screen of death? Is my hard drive dead or what? Can i try hooking up the hard drive in my other computer to see if it boots or would it still give me errors since its a completely different operating system already installed? im about fresh out of ideas. can anyone help?

If the floppy drive is connected to the same cable as the other drives then it MAY be a ZIP drive. Is there a second port next to the one in use for that cable? Take the cables off the floppy for now and connect the Hard drive and CD drive on the cable. Jumper the HDrive as Master and the CD drive as Slave. Set the boot order to boot CD drive first and HDD0 next. You should now be able to boot from a Windows CD. Watch the screens and hit any key to boot from CD when prompted. If you don't see those screens you may need to enter the BIOS and disable any Logos and also disable fast boot. That will allow you to see the POST screens.

ya no its a floppy drive. just one straight cable from the floppy drive to the middle connection forget what its called. and the had goes to the primary port and the cd drive is going to the secondary. I just tried using my harddrive and cables out of my working good computer and it doesnt work, it just keeps cycling over and over the same 4 or 5 screens and wont boot anything lol. and i also took the harddrive out of this non working computer tried it in my working computer and it still didnt run at all had problems with it being detected when i was trying to boot from a floppy disk into the hard drive. So i think the hard drive is toast and the whole computer is just toast, all tho its all brand new looking and everything. i set the jumper on the non working hard drive in the non working computer and it still just gives me the same blue screen of death. blah its hopeless.

Don't worry about booting into windows. You said you want to install XP. Just do as I described. Did you disable the logos? If you did that you should see startup screens that show the drives.

HD 0 is your first hard drive,,,usually c: hd 1 is your second hard drive...E, F, ect. Have you tried booting off a win98se boot disk? If it wont boot,A: drive is shot. Google for boot disk and you should find one that has cd rom support. There all free. Once cdrom support is up, if you cannot access the setup on the cd the cdrom is shot. Being a dos boot disk it will not install windows so you need to start windows install from the winnt.exe file. It is located in the i386 directory on the install disk. It is possible the machine was setup to boot off a network or the hard dive was fdisked but never formatted. Sounds like a fun project.... W.L.

"If it wont boot,A: drive is shot". There is no relationship between booting to a floppy and the hard drive status. Follow #3.

Sorry, I must have misread...I thought he could not get it to boot off A: D: or C: "If it wont boot,A: drive is shot. There is no relationship between booting to a floppy and the hard drive status." Never said there was a relationship. W.L.