format drive

confetti

hi,

if theres loads of threads on this already then sorry,

ive just picked up an old pc on which i want to format the drive and install xp or 2000

i put it into my pc and and formatted as ntfs (or whatever the other one than fat32 is called) that went ok,

but when i put it back into the pc and tried to boot with the xp or the win2k cd it doesnt start to install (i assumed it would with a blank formatted drive??)

and also the message ntldr missing or something was coming up, i looked this up on and got something like i need a win95 or 98 cd to fix this, but i dont understand how if ive formatted it as ntfs and its blank??????????


any ideas?

Chalk

check your bios for the boot sequence
put cd at the top and it should be ok

confetti

i did that but it didnt work, thanks though

fletch

You may need a boot disk that allows you to start with CD-ROM support

kenmc

how old is the PC??? how did you manage to format the drive in NTFS without having the CD installed??? you can't format the drive out from under itself AFAIK. It's nothing to do with having formatted the drive really. problem sounds like it's not booting the CD, and then not finding anything on the drive to boot instead, could be tricky to get it to boot now unless you have another machine you can use to make a boot disk. if so stick a disk in the floppy and type
format a: /s
and try boot that disk in the "old" pc. if that doesn't work then you're in deep doggy do, something is seriously wrong with your hardware. If it does then you should be able to get access to the CD, you may have to setup some things in a config.sys and autoexec.bat and copy some cdrom driver from somewhere... can't remember exactly how to do it it's so long since I had a pc that wouldn't boot from the CD.

confetti

i formatted the drive in my new pc in ntfs from disk managment

then i put it into the old pc again,

i presumed that with a cd in the cdrom and a formatted drive it would recognise and install the op sys as a new pc would,

i dont really know too much about it so i could be presuming wrong, i usually do with computers

i also tried unplugging the drive in my new pc and plugging in the formatted drive and installing the op sys but same problem so it must be something to do with disk rather than the bios settings

kenmc

hmmm. should be able to boot the Cdrom even with no disk installed, with a formatted disk and or a disk with a working windows or linux. sounds like the problem is your bios and/or cdrom does not support booting. you say that you changed it in the bios - can i suggest that you make sure you saved it instead of the "exit without saving" option - just in case.
failing that you're gonna have to google the procedure for getting a boot floppy which you can use to get your cdrom up, so you can boot the floppy and then "cd" to the cdrom and type "setup" or "install" or whatever....
K

smorton

if you put the cd rom as the first boot device and then put the xp cd and restart it should work fine. you press enter to make a new installation of windows and then it formats it and installs windows. i got that ntdlr missing thing too when i turned off the comp half way thru an install and redid it