i am setting up a basic system out of my leftovers from an upgrade. it is a dell optiplex gx-1, 500mhz pent3, 256ram, and a new 60g maxtor hard drive. the windows 2000pro disk that i have may not be store bought so i was having problems getting it to boot from the setup disk. i had formatted the drive and partitioned it with the software included and began following instructions to install win. wasnt gonna happen. so, i tried, being the genius that i think i am, putting the drive into my existing win2000pro system and installing it on the drive like that. swapped it back to the new setup, (yes i remembered to switch back the jumpers) start it up and BAM....nada. gave me two errors: 1) PXE-E61: media test failure, check cable. PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE 2)OS system load failure i went into setup and got the PXE business taken care of. now i just get the OS load failure every time i reboot it. im sure i did something wrong, but i just couldnt get the drive installed on the other system. i may need to make a boot disk on my existing system. PLEASE IDEAS. i know a lot about a little and a little about alot. STUMPED

so you have a media error. Is the drive detected in BIOS? Is the "the windows 2000pro disk that i have may not be store bought so i was having problems getting it to boot from the setup disk." a backup of W2K. that only works on the same machine. you need to get a valid system disk with the product code key.

its a copy disk, i have the code key. it installs fine, i have used it before. but i have NEVER done a clean install on a new drive. i assumed that if i tried to boot from the windows cd, i could do the install. it wont do it. i cant get to BIOS to look at anything. when it boots, it shows the vid info and then ERROR LOADING OS. thats all.

to clarify: i have used it to do clean installs/repairs/upgrades on different systems that already run windows. this is the first time i am trying to do an OS install on a new drive.

Humm, can't get into bios. I don't know much about dell's MB's. and they're not forthcoming with info such as downloadable manuals either. Dude, you gettin' dell'd. I guess you're not getting the BIOS entry prompt right after the POST. Some MB's have a jumper that prevents that prompt to keep people from messing with it. I suspect the disk will work but due to the "media test error" you have to verify if bios recognizes it. You won't be able to install until you resolve that. Common keys to enter bios are Del, F1, Esc, F10 etc.

RayMan: yeah it was totally dell'd. i got it solved though. i reformatted the drive and used an old win 98 disk and then installed/upgraded with the 2k disk. thanks for the help and insight. us-1 them-0 thanks