CrashG Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 Well, I am going to ask a friend who is great with computers to see if he has an XP Home install cd to see if that will work.I tried putting the working dvd drive as the master instead of cable select with the one hard drive (that I'm going to format) hooked up, but it wouldn't get past the Dell Boot screen. What's up with that? The way I would do it is to have each device (HDD & Optical Drive) on it's own ribbon cable and both set to Master. It sounds like you have them both on the same cable and both set as Master. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nodiaque Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 your cd might not be working (the media). Try to get a windows xp home cd (dell if your computer is dell but then, if it's a dell, call dell and ask for a replacement disk, it will be 5$ for shipping and you'll have the one with the drivers for your computer). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mystic MVC Posted May 5, 2008 Author MVC Share Posted May 5, 2008 The way I would do it is to have each device (HDD & Optical Drive) on it's own ribbon cable and both set to Master. It sounds like you have them both on the same cable and both set as Master. I would double check. I am pretty sure I didn't though because the ide cable that was with the optical drives had 2 slots on it and the ide cable connected to the hard drives had 2 slots on it. So unless there is some new super ide cable with 4 slots, then I'm screwed. :p I'll definetly check tomorrow though, there could be some issue like you mentioned and I will try to get some more pictures/details about 14 hours from now. Hopefully you will be able to help then. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CrashG Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 I'll be here tomorrow, just PM me if you need to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nodiaque Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 dvd loading problem, it's a jumper problem. Also, for the "doesn't boot from it", older bios refused to boot from cd/dvd which wasn't in the primary IDE connection. You might want to try to invert your cd and dvd place, remove "boot from hard disk" in bios and let only "boot from cd". Also, I don't know if that cd already worked but I've seen many computer locking like that because they try to see if the cd can boot in the POST screen (when that Dell logo is). If it fail to read, it will take forever. Try booting without the cd in the dvd to see if it lock up. If it does, it's a jumper problem. Not all bios like CS. Put both on master and place them on different ribbon (place doesn't matter if you force master with jumper). Your cable might be defective too, so switching place with hard drive might help identify that problem(seen that a lot too) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mystic MVC Posted May 5, 2008 Author MVC Share Posted May 5, 2008 dvd loading problem, it's a jumper problem.Also, for the "doesn't boot from it", older bios refused to boot from cd/dvd which wasn't in the primary IDE connection. You might want to try to invert your cd and dvd place, remove "boot from hard disk" in bios and let only "boot from cd". Also, I don't know if that cd already worked but I've seen many computer locking like that because they try to see if the cd can boot in the POST screen (when that Dell logo is). If it fail to read, it will take forever. Try booting without the cd in the dvd to see if it lock up. If it does, it's a jumper problem. Not all bios like CS. Put both on master and place them on different ribbon (place doesn't matter if you force master with jumper). Your cable might be defective too, so switching place with hard drive might help identify that problem(seen that a lot too) I know its not defective because when the computer is at the desktop (if I return everything to the normal setup), I can access the dvd drive we are talking about which is on the same ribbon as the broken cd one. Edit: I will definetly try swapping the two optical drives around like you mention to see if that does anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nodiaque Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 well if one optical drives is defective, no need to play with it, remove it and only leave the dvd and hard disk, both on different ribbon on master. If it doesn't work, swap hard disk and optical drive from ribbon (exchange ribbon and position, so if Ribbon A is Primary on Hard Disk and B on Secondary Optical Drive, you put A on Primary on Optical and B on Secondary on Hard Disk). Thus, if it still doesn't work, you're sure it's not the ribbon and bios not liking boot from secondary (don't forget to switch jumper on both to master). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
offroadaaron Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 I saw leave it and take it to a computer place lol.... then get them to partition a data or storage partition so that anything thats important can be place and that and if the computer ever needs to be reformated your windows partition will go back all your important data will stay in tacked. ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mystic MVC Posted May 5, 2008 Author MVC Share Posted May 5, 2008 Wow guys, I don't know where to start. Finally got a hold of my other brother's XP Home CD. I was trying what Nodiaque said to no avail because it still wouldn't get past that Dell Boot Screen. Finally, I put it back together again and was back at the desktop. I popped in that XP Home CD and started going through the installation. All the cd key issues I was having above didn't happen because I had the right cd (not the Professional one). Anyways, back to the installation. After I put in the cd key it started saying it was ready to install, it just needed to restart?!?!? I was about ready to explode at this point. All that time spent trying to get it to boot from cd was unnecessary! So after the restart, the XP installation started going. I formatted the 74gig hard drive as well as trying to format the 4 gig harddrive that XP was previously running off of (it failed) because it said the installation was using files from there. I installed a fresh version then on the 74 gig hard drive and after the eventual reboot, the 4 gig hard drive (with a working XP still on it), didn't cause any problems. I checked it in the boot options menu (my computer-properties-advanced-startup and recovery-settings), and there are two XP's there, so I just left the option off so it wouldn't try to dual boot. So thanks to everybody that helped out, I think my brother will definetly be happy with his fast (old) computer! :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CrashG Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 Seems like several different issues were going on, but glad you got it working though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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