Just like my luck, it’s hard to find IDE drives anymore. So, I purchased a SATA RAID Controller card and a 1T SATA drive. Well, I attempted to install the drivers to the SATA Controller card by pressing F6 at the beginning of the Windows Setup. I was told that the installation failed because the text files could not be found. Confused why my system would not read the floppy drive, I made sure the boot process was set to the floppy disc. When that didn’t work, I set the CD drive as the first boot so I could load the Windows XP CD.
Each time I booted up, I was told that I had a Boot Error and was asked to remove any media in the drive and re-boot. The only problem was, there was NO media in the floppy drive. I even removed the floppy drive from the machine. Yet each time I attempt to boot from IDE-0, I get the same error message BOOT SYSTEM ERROR. Now in order to boot into Windows, the Windows XP CD must be in the CD-ROM drive.
Other media such as Spotmau BootSuite and Ultimate Boot CD will boot without the Windows CD, but I can’t get Hirens Boot CD to do anything.
Again, my system is old (built in 2001) but it has been working great until lately. Several Hard drives that I have installed over time have simply failed for some reason or another.
But the strangest issue is: The BOOT SYSTEM ERROR message I am getting is typical of the message one would get when a floppy disk was left in the floppy drive — which I do not have anymore.
