Need Windows CD to boot?

G

Gibo

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 15, 2003
Messages
106
I recently had to replace my motherboard and videocard (some sort of massive hardware failure....alas). Anyway, now every time I boot, it'll give me the "BOOT DISK NOT FOUND" error unless I have a bootable CD in the drive. I've been sticking the WinXP CD in. If there's a bootable CD, it'll bring the "Press any key to boot from CD" text up, I ignore it, and it proceeds to load Windows normally. I've tried changing the boot order to put hard drive instead of CD, but then it just doesn't detect a boot disk and I get nothing.

Any ideas?
 
try changing the hard drive boot order. that is if u have more then one hard drive. bios is tricky like that. sometimes it has a storage drive as a first boot device for hard drives. look around. if that made sense... i think it did
 
Look for which of your hard drives has the "boot.ini" file on it.
That wants to go first in the boot order.
If that does not work then your boot files are hosed and will need to be repaired.

Luck........... :D
 
Go into windows setup at boot (from the cd), then on the first screen after it loads the drivers, press R to enter the recovery console. Put in your administrator password (if you don't have one, just hit enter) and select your OS (prob. #1). Type fixboot c: and then you should be fine. This is assuming that your OS is on C: of course, otherwise substitue the correct drive letter.

You may also be able to get away with this in windows by going into msconfig (type msconfig in the run box) and click on the boot.ini tab. Then hit check all paths and restart.

 
Boot order is correct, the boot hard drive is listed first. I'm guessing the boot.ini file did get messed up somehow, but I already did a Windows repair and it didn't solve anything.

I just did a search and there doesn't seem to be a boot.ini. That's a problem. I'll deal with that tomorrow, I suppose.
 
The method I described will rewrite the boot.ini file.

 
I had the exact same thing happen except I didn't have anything fry. Just unplugged the comp from wall and next day when plugged back in it had that error. Tried changing boot order same error CD boot or no.
Weird solution that I found
I have two sata hard drives. Drive 1 has OS. 2 is backup.
Unplug 1 boot. Get error
Plug one back in unplug 2. boot. Get error.
Plug 2 back in. Windows
 
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