[MorphiusFaydal]

Dilerious, on 5 Mar, 2008 - 06:14 PM, said:

the LED lights work fine.
It's once it tries to boot windows, it restarts itself.
before it tries to load windows, it some sort of system check, and checks for hardware. I think it tries to check for the old hardware and realises it's not there. I've installed new hardware since, like motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU, CD Drive.
Is there a way to turn the system check thing off?

That's the POST. That's your motherboard looking at everything that's plugged into it and saying "HI! I'm the BIOS. What are you?" Hardware checks like you seem to be thinking of don't actually happen until you load an operating system.

You need to set the CDROM as first in the boot order. Make sure your computer is trying to boot from the CDROM rather than from the hard drive.

[Dilerious]

I did that, i made the other devices disabled, and boot from CDROM only, and it didn't work. So I enabled the Hard disk as the second device that was enabled and it still didn't work.

[Dilerious]

I rang a local PC repair guy, and they said they'd just do what you guys suggested.
Would it solve it if I just bought a new hard disk?...

[MorphiusFaydal]

Dilerious, on 7 Mar, 2008 - 07:22 PM, said:

I rang a local PC repair guy, and they said they'd just do what you guys suggested.
Would it solve it if I just bought a new hard disk?...

Doubtful. It's a problem with either your CDROM, or your motherboard. What does and Ubuntu livecd do?

EDIT:
And when I say "motherboard", I am including the BIOS in that.

This post has been edited by MorphiusFaydal: 07 March 2008 - 10:14 PM

[Dilerious]

I dont understand what you mean by
"What does and Ubuntu livecd do?"

[MorphiusFaydal]

Does an Ubuntu LiveCD boot?

[Dilerious]

I haven't tried, but i'm guessing if the windows disk wont boot, Ubuntu won't boot. The windows disk does work, it's been tested.

[MorphiusFaydal]

Try the Ubuntu disk. I've had disk drives not work right with Windows install cds.

[Dilerious]

Is there any other alternatives?

[GWatt]

Dilerious, on 8 Mar, 2008 - 04:31 PM, said:

Is there any other alternatives?

Sure. You could try the Fedora live CD. Gentoo also has a full live CD if you don't like Fedora either. If you had a previous version of Linux installed, that might cause problems too. Windows doesn't like LVMs, so I've had to wipe the disk when transitioning PCs from Linux to Windows.
Remember, you're trying to determine if the computer itself is the problem, or if Windows is just being difficult. What version of Windows are you trying to install anyway?

[MorphiusFaydal]

Gentoo actually has a liveCD that is about 54megabytes in size. It's about the smallest liveCD there is. I use it a lot just to test hardware and see what's in a computer.

[pertheusual]

You might try only having the CD drive as primary master without the harddrive connected at all. Windows install can boot fine without a disk, and it will narrow down the problem.

Per

[Dilerious]

I'm trying to install windows XP home edition.
I don't think the disk or the OS is the problem.

[GWatt]

I know XP can't handle SATA drives, but other hardware might also cause fubar-ness. Just get a live linux cd and put that in. If linux boots fine, it's your Windows install disk. If the computer does nothing useful, then something's wrong with your hardware configuration or your BIOS.
My bet is that Windows doesn't like your hardware. XP is 7 or so years old right now and hardware has changed.

[PsychoCoder]

Ive never heard of that. I just switched from XP and I have SATA drives. Are you sure about that statement?