Boot Problem

[Ladytrae]

I am hoping someone can help. I have tried and tried and now I seek help!

I have an Emachine T2482 I am trying to run restore cd's on. First some history.

I wanted to restore my computer after it being the community comp that everyone used and now its full of junk and Id like it to wiped clean, back to new. Its been done on this computer before. It wont boot from cd. I have changed the bios and it goes to a black screen and says the cd's manufacturer and sits there with a blinking cursor and does nothing. I have tried to purposely mess it up so it would ask for the disk and nothing.

After a few weeks of messing with it off and on I gave up and slipstreamed a friends copy of XP with SP2 using autostreamer to make a bootable disk. Formated installed and all went well. Now I only had a 30 day time period to register and no serial so I figured I would install Vista (it cant be as bad as Im hearing from everyone) WRONG! I wont even go into that.

So I figured whatever problem there was should be fixed, right? Its not. Its been three maybe four weeks now and I am back to this mission. I want Vista off and I want to run the restore cd's like it should have been done. But I still cant get this thing to boot from a cd. I even went back to the way the machine was when I bought it. Took out the extra memory, removed the other hard drive, original keyboard and mouse even. Nothing. I tried to run the slipstreamer disk I made to the point where it said push any key and slipped the restore cd in but It didnt work.

Is there a way to slipstream an OEM restore disk? This thing has got me to where I want to kick it out my front door. Any suggestions would be great! Thanks, Ladytrae

[RadishTM Veteran]

Have you tried the bootable recovery disks on another PC, just to see if they boot?

Also how many optical drives does your PC have?, if two - load the CD's in the first drive.

Radish?

[Tha Bloo Monkee]

I'm not positive about how the recovery works on your system, but is the recovery partition still on the drive? Are the recovery CDs meant to only boot, then work from the partition?

What I did with my computer (a prebuilt Compaq) when I bought it was I took the i386 folder (the Windows XP folder), and used nLite to make it bootable, so I installed that on my computer like that to remove the junk.

Are you sure the CD is not scratched? Did you make those discs yourself or did they come with the computer preused?

Do you still have the serial that came with your computer!?

See if the CDs work on another computer first :) ( < Edit: Radish beat me to that part)

[Ladytrae]

I just tried the disk in my other system and it boots and runs normally. The disks have been kept in those clear snap on protective skin cover things since I got them. From Emachines, I didnt make them. I am only using the top drive. I DO know the serial for my computer. I think I answered everything. Thanks for responding, maybe we can figure this out. Ladytrae-

[Tha Bloo Monkee]

Hmm, that's odd. But other CDs will boot fine from the same drive? Have they worked in the past and not now? Is the recovery partition still on the hard drive or has that been wiped or swapped with another drive?

[Ladytrae]

This is what I have come across today. I finally found something out there relating to my problem. (pdf attached)Now I just need to figure out how to take it from here. When I follow the directions through the step by step confirmations and I get to the DEVICEHIGH=OAKCDROM and I answer Y it stalls after telling me the manufacturer info (Oak Technology) and that there are no device drivers for D:GEMCD001 which is a OTI-91X ATAPI CD-ROM device driver. I had no luck finding this driver either. But I thought I would post this maybe someone might have some ideas for me now that I can identify better whats going on. Thanks.

CheckingAnImageFileWithGhost.pdfFetching info...

[k22]

how about you disconnect the top drive, make the bottom drive master during the reinstall and then switch back once it is done?

this would rule out the top drive hardware being faulty since you know the discs are good.

also, depending upon your BIOS you should be able to press one of the function keys (maybe F8 or F12?) during POST to bring up a one time boot selection menu.