Need urgent help.

T

tpfaff

2[H]4U
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Jan 30, 2006
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Tonight I just installed a new Zalman heatsink on my x800xl and now i get an error when booting saying that i need to reboot and select proper boot device. Of course im booting windows xp from my hdd, It was working fine before my new heatsink, My harddrive is recognized in BIOS and I hadnt altered the wiring in any way, I am totally stumped and agitated and would love your guys help
 
You have either a 3.5" floppy in your bay, or a bootable CD-ROM
 
yeah it sounds as though the normal boot device wasnt present at switch on at least one time. The CMOS will take any currently present hard drives and make one of them the default boot drive. This wont change if the disconnected drive re-appears so you need to go into the CMOS and set the correct drive to boot from.
This problem only usually happens if you have more than 1 hard drive.

An alternative suggestion...
If you have changed the master/slave setting on the drive or fitted it to the wrong cable you can experience booting problems as Windows NT/2000/XP writes the exact location of the hard drive to a file called boot.ini which it uses on bootup to address the correct drive to boot from. Even if it does read the boot.ini, if the drive has moved location it wont be able to boot from it. The error is usually different but just in case this is FYI.
 
Hmmm I have it set to boot from hdd, It wont, maybe I plugged in a different sata power cord, ill try the others.
 
Someone please help i have no idea what the hell is wrong, the hdd is the only device I have connected so theres no way its booting from something else, the hdd is connected to the mobo and the psu I JUST DONT G ET IT its really making me mad I have no Idea whats wrong SO please Hlep ME
 
It sounds like the XP install corrupted or something along that line. You may just have to reinstall on the HDD and start over again. (This is assuming that the error you are seeing is that it is telling you to insert a proper disk and press CTRL-ALT-DEL to continue). That is a bootsector failure/corruption.

It is a bad situation, but it does happen.
 
problem is i Dont have the cds. This is what i thought the problem was to,corrupted boot.ini file. I dont know how to reformat or reinstall windows because I dont have the original in stall cds. :(
 
Check both sides of the sata cable, are they both connected?
 
Do a basic troubleshoot: Disconnect and reconnect everything.

It only takes a slight misalignment for that error message. Also follow all anti-static precautions.
 
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