boot up

cormie

My pc wont boot up. It just gets to the gateway screen and stays there for ages. There was a problem with it recognising the HD and then I gave it to my friend to try and fix and now it wont get by the gateway screen. It did when I first turned it on, took quite a while, and then it said no OS found (which is fine cuz there is none on the HD) but then I put in my XP cd to install and it wouldnt get past the gateway screen. Any help would be appreciated.

Any chance of any of you physically helping? How much would you charge? I'm in Bray, can call to you with it.

Batbat

well go to bios and see if it recognises and hard drive on auto settings, also check that there is not 2 primarys on the same ide channel

Khannie

If you want to boot from the CD (to install because you have no OS on the hard drive to boot from), you need to set that in the bios.

"First bootable device" or something like that usually. Don't forget to switch it back to the hdd when you're finished.

Not being bad, but do you know what the bios is? and how to access it?

<edit>
Also, are you sure that the cd is a bootable cd? I don't have XP, so I'm not sure if they're all bootable cd's. I know that the 2k ones aren't all bootable.
</edit>

Gurgle

the gateway screen

I think I may know what the problem is.