Ok, I have built a lot of PCs from scratch and fixed a lot of them but the problem I am having with this PC is just too much for me.
I got this PC to fix for someone, the PC will not boot. I wanted to reinstall windows xp from sratch but I couldn’t boot from the CD-ROM for some reason.
It goes past the CD-ROM and tries to boot from the HDD instead (which is not booting).
What I did..
– Swapped IDE Cable
– Tried different DVD-ROM
– Tried another XP CD
– Yes I do see the CD-ROM in the BIOS and the boot order is set to CD-ROM first and if I reboot and go back in the CMOS it does retain the settings.
At that point I was sure it was a bad motherboard so I went and bought a combo motherboard with new ram and new CPU (a small upgrade from what she gave me in the first place to end up with a PIII 800 Mhz)
I am still having the same problem!!
Will not boot from the damn DVD-ROM, I do the same troubleshooting again, try new DVD-ROM with a new IDE Cable, unplugging everything but the DVD-ROM, if HDD is not attached and doesn’t try to boot from it I get the error “Boot FailureSystem Halted”. WTF? Anyone with suggestions please feel free to comment.
Remember, the Motherboard, memory and CPU has been changed..