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djfunktion
01-30-2005, 01:58 AM
I have a Dell Latitude CPi R series laptop computer. I got it from somebody else and I wanted to wipe the HD and start anew. After wiping the HD, I tried to load Windows XP. I kept getting a message saying, "No boot sector on hard disk." I went into my BIOS and specified the CD-ROM to boot from. This didn't work - kept getting the same message.

Do I need to load some type of driver so the machine recognizes the CD-ROM? Just so you know, I tried the six floppy start up disks, but couldn't get this to work because I had to transfer form those floppies to the CD-ROM. This machine has inter-changable drives and when I pulled out the floppy drive to put in the CD-ROM drive, it failed.

Please help a brother out?
bailey
01-30-2005, 02:53 AM
what method did you use to wipe the drive ?
what is the O/S
do you have the full version of the O/S cd or a restore cd ?
more info needed
nicolaus corelius
01-30-2005, 10:32 AM
i know the problem. you need to create a boot.ini file on the HD. this happened to me too and dell couldnt help me. i connected a second drive and then edited the boot.ini on the second one to start up the first one.
djfunktion
01-30-2005, 01:54 PM
Bailey -

I wiped the drive using "WipeDrive" which completely eliminates all hard drive data.

The OS I want to load on the computer is Windows XP. It was on there before.

Yes, I do have the full version of Windows XP Pro.

Again, when I put the CD in the CD-ROM and start up, I get a message saying, "No boot sector on hard disk."
djfunktion
01-30-2005, 01:57 PM
Nicolaus -

Does this mean I need an external HD that I attach to my laptop? I have another PC with XP, can I put the boot.ini file on floppy an load that on laptop?
bailey
01-30-2005, 04:09 PM
it may be that the drive is no longer formated or partitioned, and the computer is not booting from the cdrom,
so you may need to get into the bios and set the cdrom to be the first boot device, then it should work from the xp cd and then you can reformatt the drive.
djfunktion
01-31-2005, 02:58 PM
Bailey -

I tried that several different times but keep getting the same result.