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General discussion

Question about new hard drive, please help

Aug 16, 2004 2:14PM PDT

So i bought a new hard drive today because my old one died, i installed it and popped the windows xp cd in making sure cd-rom is the first boot device when i start up. Thats when i am greeted with a message that says "Invalid BOOT Diskette
Insert BOOT Diskette in drive A:"
So, ok...i look for the windows xp boot disk and find it on microsoft's site. Pop that disk in and i'm greeted with the same message. Am i doing somthing wrong? I have never installed a new hard drive so am i missing something? Any help would be appreciated

Discussion is locked

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Re: Question about new hard drive, please help
Aug 16, 2004 4:41PM PDT

ok first when you turn on the computer go in to your bios if you have a dell it will be f12 if not either be escape or f1 or f2 then choose your boot prority and it will go in to this order hdd,cdrom,floppy if that dont work try it in this order cdrom,hdd.floppy save to cmos and exit, (why you are in the bios go ahead and open your cdrom door and put your cd in) when the computer loads it should automatically start the process cause they is no way it can boot into floppy with out going through cdrom or hdd first hope this helps good luck

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Re: Question about new hard drive, please help
Aug 16, 2004 10:55PM PDT

I have never seen a Dell that uses F12, they either use F2, F1 or the Delete key. All Dells made in the last 2-3 years use F2.

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Re: Question about new hard drive, please help
Aug 16, 2004 11:43PM PDT

I tried both of those, and neither worked. I saw on another website that i might have to run fdisk and format before i could use the hd, so i found my old dell resource cd and booted that up and formatted and ran fdisk. Everything went well, so i restarted and now i get a "Invalid system disk, remove disk and hit any key" message. Now the resource cd wont even let me boot into dos anymore, it just goes to that message everytime even tho floppy is set to boot last...

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Re: Question about new hard drive, please help
Aug 18, 2004 11:05PM PDT

You do not run Fdisk and format with Windows XP. What you do is put in the Dell Windows XP CD, boot from the CD drive and then partition the drive during the install, that is one of the first options, to delete the partition (if you mistakenly created it with Fdisk) and then create a new one that is NTFS.

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Re: Question about new hard drive, please help
Aug 16, 2004 5:32PM PDT

that's a puzzler.

well if you're certain you did in fact set your boot sequence to start with cd, (check that first), that message may mean you accidentally disconnected the cd drive and maybe the a drive while you were installing the hdd . . .

so I would check boot sequence again, and your wires . . . also the jumpers on the new hdd may be conflicting with the cd rom drive. do cable select on everything.

--fj

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Re: Question about new hard drive, please help
Aug 17, 2004 2:58AM PDT

Did you press any key when it it asked..."press any key to boot from cd"? It goes through very quickly (maybe 3-5 seconds).

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Re: Question about new hard drive, please help
Aug 18, 2004 1:20PM PDT

psst hey reset your boot priority now it will go hdd cdrom and floppy and see if you took the floppy out of the floppy drive

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Re: Question about new hard drive, please help
Aug 18, 2004 1:23PM PDT

and by the way excuse me if i forgot if i rearranged my f12 to be my bios

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Re: Question about new hard drive, please help
Aug 19, 2004 5:08AM PDT

I KNOW THIS MIGHT SOUND SILLY BUT I TAKE IT THAT THAT YOU SET UP THE CD AS YOUR BOOT DRIVE FROM THE BIOS SCREEN. DID YOU SAVE THIS SETTING PRIOR TO REBOOTING.