Windows XD - Failure to start without CD

[Yumitarou]

Had computer trouble recently, and had to reformat hard disk, format worked ok, and windows installed ok, but the computer fails to boot windows XP from the hard disk, unless a windows XP CD is in the CD drive. Any help for this problem would be appreciated, and thanks in advance ^^

[richh0323]

Check the BIOS setup, make sure you are booting from "C" drive and not the CD

[PSYKLONUS]

I had this same problem. Do you have a serial ATA drive at all? And did you format recently IF SO- I think it is something to do with the way that Windows XP treats the SATA drive. When you install XP and it says "F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver" and you select that option (because you want to install onto your newer, faster SATA drive), Windows automatically detects the PATA/IDE drives first, essentially making them C, D, E etc This is why when you go to install and partition it doesnt detect the SATA drives first. So you will go 'yeah, install to my SATA drive' everything will be fine and dandy there, but when you go to reboot it looks on C: for the boot record and not finding it there, wont start. I dont know why it works when you put the CD in either, this is just something I discovered. The way I fixed it was to format, but firstly disabling the IDE drives in BIOS before I started. When Windows is up and running on your SATA drive, you can then re-enable them in BIOS. The only other problem is that you will then have to go into computer management in XP and change all the drive letters as the new HDs will be given letters after the optical drives which can make drive identification confusing. Cheers Dane