CD boot problem

[Russ]

Hi

I am trying to install XP Home on a system I have installed a couple of times before.

I never get the "Press any key to boot from cd ..." prompt, the system jumps straight to CD & boots.

This is fine until the system tries to reboot from hard disk halfway through the installation process, when it boots from CD again.

I have tried :
1) another keyboard with mouse disconnected, in case this one is streaming garbage
2) another boot cd, just in case ...
3) upgrading the bios
4) changing the boot sequence in the bios halfway through the installation process - it goes into a "boot failure" loop, never completes.

My gut feel is that this has to be a bios setting, but I can't find one which affects this.

For the record, the motherboard is an Asus A7A266-E and the bios is Award rev 1012.

This is driving me nuts - please can anyone shed any light on how I can get this sorted out - I have a new 200Gb disk ready to go but I can't use it !

Thanks in advance

Russ

[ruelnov]

Check to see under BIOS Setup (Primary IDE Channel) if the full capacity of your Hard Drive (200Gb) is detected. If not, then your BIOS needs to be patched to support 200Gb so you can properly boot from this HD.

If your 200Gb HD is fully detected, I would suspect this to be a RAM problem which I also experienced before. I would recommend that you test your RAM (using memtest86 for example).

[Ritchie]

The solution may be simpler than that.

When I boot to Windows 2000 or XP installation, I usually set my boot order in the BIOS so that the CD or DVD drive boots first. I often find this necessary because even if the CD or DVD drive is part of the boot order but comes after the C drive - that causes the system to automatically boot off the C drive and not give me a chance to boot off te CD or DVD drive if there is any data on the hard disk.

This causes the effect that when the Windows installation reboots the system, the system boot off the CD or DVD drive again since it is first in the boot order. So as it reboots, I simply enter into the BIOS setup again, change the boot order back to let the C drive boot first again, and then save settings and exit. Then the system will boot off the hard disk again, which it should be doing at this point in the installation.

[Russ]

Guys

Thanks for your interest, I have tried that to no avail. The big disk is recognised fine, and if I change the boot sequence halfway through to force the system to boot from the hard disk I get a boot failure with no error messages, it just goes into a continuous loop.

Even if that did work, it would be great but it still wouldn't fix the underlying problem.

I think I read somewhere that the boot code on a hard disk comes from the BIOS; if that's true I guess I'm looking at CMOS corruption ?

I'm way out of my depth here, if anyone can help I'll be deeply in your dept.

Russ

[Rainbow]

The 1012 BIOS should support drives over 128GB (137GB) fine. But Windows does not. Create smaller partition during SETUP and read this http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -us;303013