Topic: laptop not booting, how to reboot from disc?

[Billy Mumphrey]

Ok so I tried to install win 2000 on my laptop, but it ended up not working, needless to say, my laptop is freezing before it boots up. so I tried restarting the unit with my xin xp pro disc in the cd-rom drive but it won't boot from the cd-rom. It won't boot up in safe mode either.

Are there settings i can change so it automatically boots from the cd-rom drive?

Maybe a floppy boot disk will work?

I really don't know much about these things, thanks for the help in advance!

[TNJazz]

Ok so I tried to install win 2000 on my laptop, but it ended up not working, needless to say, my laptop is freezing before it boots up. so I tried restarting the unit with my xin xp pro disc in the cd-rom drive but it won't boot from the cd-rom. It won't boot up in safe mode either.

Are there settings i can change so it automatically boots from the cd-rom drive?

Maybe a floppy boot disk will work?

I really don't know much about these things, thanks for the help in advance!

Need more info - laptop make and model first of all.  Second, did you load 2000 parallel to XP, or over top of an old install?  Booting order is set in the BIOS - you should be able to change it there (how to get there depends on make and model).

Dirk

[Billy Mumphrey]

thanks Dirk.

compaq armada m300 pIII

I reformatted then installed 2000, so I guess over an old install.

[TNJazz]

Best thing to do here is do a complete reinstall.  Here's the process I always use when reinstalling an OS.

Assuming you have a bootable floppy disk available, do the following:

1.  Download a Win98 boot disk (http://www.bootdisk.com is a good resource).  Make sure it has SMARTDRV.EXE on it.  If not, download it from somewhere (Google it and you'll find it) and put it on the boot disk.

2.  once the computer boots to the A: prompt, type fdisk.  This will walk you through creating partitions, etc. in DOS mode.  I would delete all the partitions (follow the prompts) and then create a new primary DOS partition.  It will verify disk integrity and then ask you to reboot.

3.  Reboot to the disk again, and when you get to the A: prompt, format the C: drive using the format command (format C: <enter>)  This will write zeros as a FAT filesystem to the drive.  Once that finishes, reboot and boot to the Windows CD.  During Windows setup, when it asks you if you want to format the drive to NTFS or leave the filesystem intact - leave it alone and just install Windows on it.  You can convert it to NTFS quickly and easily later on.

This will give you a completely clean install of Windows.  You may need to set your BIOS settings to boot from the CD.  I would advise you to set the boot order to be floppy, CD, removable drive, then hard drive last.  This means it will follow this boot sequence every time.

Not sure how you access the BIOS on a Compaq - every manufacturer is different.  Typically to get into the SETUP screen you will see a message at bootup that gives you the key command.  ESC, F2, F5, F8, F10 and F12 are the most likely keys.  It's also possible that it's BIOS specific from the manufacturer.  If you actually have a non-Compaq BIOS, check this site for reference:  http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/bios_manufacturer.htm

Good luck!
Dirk

[Ed.]

couldn't you just boot from the xp disc once you change the settings in the bios, then format the drive in the initial xp setup.  that's what i've always done and i've never had any problems.

i'm guessing right now, your laptop is still setup to be booting from the hdd, however, you formatted it and now theres nothing on the drive...or a bad install of 2000.  If you switch the bios to load from cdrom first it should boot right off the xp cd.

I don't think a normal win2k disk is bootable, so you could make floppys from the disc on a different computer and try to reinstall 2k on it.

[Billy Mumphrey]

+t's all around, I'm SUCH A MORON, I didn't burn the win xp disc right, I tried my original win 2000 disc and it booted from disc right away. I reburn my win xp disc and it boots from it right away. I am a moron, I wasted at least, 4 hours trying to figure this out.