I recently attempted to install a second operating system by partitioning my hard drive and booting from a CD into that partition. Before actually installing anything I turned my computer off. There were no errors or problems. I then wanted to boot back into my main Windows XP partition so I changed the BIOS to boot from the hard drive. After rebooting I got the following message on a blank screen after the intel logo was displayed: "reboot and select proper boot device or insert media in selected boot device and press a key" I realize that the windows partition was not active, but I think there would be a different message if the partition was wrong. I tried booting off the Windows recovery DVD and was able to access the recovery console and see my Windows installation. I'm not exactly sure, but I don't think the hard disk is booting even though it is selected in the BIOS as the boot device. Is this a hardware or software problem and is there any way to fix it without sending it to the manufacturer? model: ASUS S96J specs found here: http://www.notebookreview.com/defau...

Apparently you already have WinXP installed on the C partition. How did you go about creating the 2nd partition & which OS where you planning to install on it?

Yes Windows XP is installed. However I don't think that partition is set as active. I created the second partition by resizing an existing partition using Partition Magic. My intent was to install Mac OSX (illegal I know). However, before any installing actually happened, I restarted the computer and changed the BIOS to boot from the hard disk. This is where the problem arose.

edit: There is nothing on the second partition. It is essentially blank space that has been set as active. I need to know if there is a power problem with the hard drive since nothing boots from it. Only the DVD drive will boot.

I've setup numerous dual boot systems before but have absolutely no experience with what you're trying to do with OSX. How exactly did you use Partition Magic? I would have installed it on XP, then opened the program, configured the partitions how I wanted, then let PM do it's thing. It would have rebooted, made the changes from outside the OS, then booted into XP again after it was complete. At what point did you lose access to XP? I'm unsure what you mean about "booting from a CD into that partition". You used what CD? to boot into an empty partition? I'm also unclear about the need for all these changes to the boot order. Assuming there's no floppy drive involved, the 1st boot device would be the optical drive, 2nd would be the HDD. There should be no reason to change this...if no CD (or DVD) is detected, it would skip over it & boot off the HDD. You *may* have to do a "repair install" to be able to access XP again, but like I said, I'm unclear as to exactly what you've done, so the repair may not be necessary.

If you have Partition Magic on cd, boot PM and set the XP partition active. IF you made the new partition befor the XP's partition then you may have other problems later.