Os install...not successful

[NoClue]

My cousin, after all these years decided to upgrade his OS from Win98 to WinXP. At work he aquirred an oem full version of WinXP. When he tried to install it on his pc he got a message saying that he could not upgrade but had to do a full install. After formatting the hard drive he is unable to install Xp.

When he turns on the pc (with a boot disk or boot CD in the respective drive) the pc will ignore them and always goes looking for the OS in the HD. Since the HD is empty it gives him an invalid system disk error and asks to replace it with a valid system disk.

I had to do the exact same thing he did. But when I booted my pc it loaded the necessary files from the boot disk and I was able to install OS. Why is his pc not booting from the Diskette or CD ??? Does he need to change something in the Bios???

Thanks for any help.

[Doobie]

Go intot he Bios and set first boot device to CD-ROm then save and exit.. It should now boot from cd.

[NoClue]

Doobie,
I did not find the option "first boot device" in the bios (award bios). What I found was an option that said boot sequence. So I changed that, tried all the sequences, but the dang thing keeps on showing the same problem:
Searching DMI pool data....
Invalid system disk...replace and press any key to continue.

I also tried installation of other versions of OS; Win2000; WinXp, but always get the same message.
Could it be that the builder of the system (CompUSA) has it so that the PC will only accept a boot disk made by them???

What else do you or anybody recommend I do....I am all ears, well in this case eyes..lol.

I don't want to have to tell my cousin that his pc is useless, since it was my bugging him that got him to do the upgrade.

Thanks Doobie for your help.....and anybody else .

NoClue

[Panama Red]

How did he format the hard drive as you first indicated, if he was unable to boot to the cd drive? The boot sequence in bios should allow you to select the cd drive as the first boot device. Other than a password to protect bios changes, I don't know of any way to lock out changes to the boot sequence. Did you look for a password requirement?

[NoClue]

Hi PR,

He formatted the Hd using the format command in DOS. There is no password protecting changes in the bios. The boot sequence can be changed and I did change it and the pc will go through the bios boot sequence and recognizes all three drives. It just will not load the boot info that is on either the floppy or the CD, no matter what I have done so far.

Neither I nor my cousin ever did anything like this (format a HD and install an OS) nor have we ever fidddled with the bios.

What would you do?

Thanks

[Panama Red]

Am I correct in assuming that in order to format in DOS, he was using a boot disk (floppy)? If so, what was it a boot disk for? Chances are he formatted in FAT16 which XP doesn't work with. XP's install CD has the ability to format prior to installation but I'm not sure how it would react to a hard drive formatted in FAT16. If you have access to another pc running XP, try this. Install your cousin's hard drive in the XP system as a slave (or set jumpers on both to Cable Select). Go into Disk Managment in format the drive to NTFS format. Then reinstall it and see if that helps.

[jhirst]

Are you sure that the boot sequence is correct. Even if you have formatted incorrectly then with cdrom as the first boot device it should run that first and you will be able to format before installing XP, using the cd. You should not get this:

Searching DMI pool data....
Invalid system disk...replace and press any key to continue.

if you are first booting from the cd.

[Doobie]

is this a legit winxp cd becuase if it was copied then it might not boot.