ok i've got a soltek k8tpro 939 mobo with a amd athlon 64 3500+ cpu, and two gigs of memory. the problems is that it won't boot. it goes very slowly though the post routine, and then says "boot from cd" and then "boot failure please insert disk and press enter" I have installed windows about five times and at the end of the setup up it boots and goes back to the same thing of asking for a cd. I know that the os is installed on the hard drive because on subsequent installs, setup announces that there is already an os present on the disk, so it seem like all i have to do is to get it to boot off of the hd. I have been into bios and set the boot order to floppy, cdrom, hdd. i even tried to set it as floppy , hdd, hdd, but still it tried to boot on the cd. any suggestions? thanks

How are you installing the OS? Where did you get the install disc? Is it legitemate? Doesn't sound like it to me. The other obtion is that your HDD has a bad sector at the boot files and is causing the system not to boot. Have you ran chkdisc? One other issue...did you leave the floppy disk in and forgrt to take it out when you tried booting? IN THE MATTERS OF STYLE, swim with the current; in matters of principle, STAND LIKE A ROCK

none of the above the disk is a full retail version i ran the western digital diagnostic on the hard disk and there were no problems there is no problem with the floppy, in fact when i did leave one in it gave the the usual message about a nonsystem disk actually, i am installing the system by putting the installation disk in when it asks for a system disk, basically simply booting from the installation disk

"when it asks for a system disc"? I have installed xp, xp/pro on over 300 computers and I have never had it ask me for a system disc when it is booted with the install disc in the rom drive. I am beginning to think that you just have a bad install disc. The boot order in the bios is set to "boot from cd-rom " first then floppy second then HDD..... install the disc in the cdrom and reboot the pc and on reboot you are prompted to "boot with cd, press any key" you should hit enter and set up will start copying files to your computer. [(if you need third party drivers) hit F6 and insert floppy with third party drivers for sata drives] then inspecting and so on. That is what you should be seeing on the install if done properly. I don't ever recall it asking for you to insert a system disc.(unless the install disc you are using is a counterfeit copy or just bad. IN THE MATTERS OF STYLE, swim with the current; in matters of principle, STAND LIKE A ROCK

ok maybe i'm not explaining very well. if i boot from the installation disk, everything goes normally as you described, until it gets to the point where it should reboot. then it tries to boot from the cd rom. at that point, set up has completed its installation and all that needs to happen is that it should boot from the hard disk. I can't get it to do that. if i do reinstall, it warns me that it is about to overwrite a previously installed os, so i know that it is there on the hard drive. the disk came in the sealed green box, bought on the internet for 150 bucks. i am just convinced that that this is not the issue. why would it try to boot from the cd? maybe I'm in the wrong forum. wondering, is there a forum for bios issues?

This is so simple I am sure you have done this but......Have you removed the CD before it tries to reboot? I had this problem once when the BIOS and MOBO I had did not require you to "press any key to boot from the CD". This should force the OS to boot from the HD or not at all.

yes it just gives me 'boot from cd' and then 'boot failure, insert system disk and press enter' I have also tried different boot orders, even putting the hd as the first boot device and disabling second and third boot devices in the bios. same outcome. I tried deleting the partition during installation and doing a full format. same outcome. I tried booting with a 4.3 gig hd with windows 98 on it and it at least did something different. it spat out a bunch of errors and then came up in the 98 startup menu. i selected safe mode, but it went to a command prompt. that hard drive will boot my old computer, so i assume that the problem is with the new build, I just haven't figured it out yet. appreciate any suggestions!