Computer will not boot from CD

[mattfletcher]

My friend has bought a PC from a local dealer and it appears that the copy of Windows is not a licensed one, i.e: after 30 days it died, and there is no product key to be seen on the case or documentation.

She has asked me to try and fix it, however I have found that the machine refuses to boot from CD to allow me to reformat and reinstall.

I have tried all the tricks I know of, including turning off the quick POST, but it does not want to play the game with me. It seems to be spinning the disc up but not displaying the "press any key to load from cd" message I was expecting.

Any ideas anyone? I am 100 miles from home, and have to leave tomorrow morning, so I though this was the appropriate place to ask for help.

[Koji]

Did you go into the bios and change the boot options so that the CD-rom takes priority over the harddrive?

Tell her to contact whoever she bought the computer from. She needs to get the code from them or else there is no (legal) way to permanently keep XP on her PC.

[mattfletcher]

Yes, sorry, forgot to mention I've set the boot order correctly. cdrom > hdd and also fdd > cdrom > hdd for a bit of variety

I think she was pretty much conned into taking the PC as w/o OS, but the guy "thoughtfully" put an unactivated windows xp home on as his idea of a free trial. Git.

Anyway, I have a brand spanking new copy of XP Pro ready to install for her. She's taken the PC back twice already in the month she's had it, all for this problem, but he keeps charging her for the pleasure of ineffectual fobbing off. When she told me, I decided to just keep out the guy's way, I think my friend learned her lesson, and I don't want to have to deal with the shark again!

[Koji]

That's really odd... There are windows CD-key changers... you should be able to find one, put it on a disk, boot her PC into safe mode (safe mode without network support SHOULD work even if windows isn't activated) After changing the CD-key to the brand new one you have, you should be able to activate windows from there (you'll have to call their line since internet will be disabled)

If you can't find a cdkey-changer (not sure about the legality of them. I would assume it'd be fine since you are changing it to a legal CD-key) you should at least be able to reinstall XP from there. It's not exactly recommended... but I do think it'd probably be fine.

Or if you have an old dos boot up disk you should also be able to run install from there. If you don't have a dos bootup disk you should at least be able to find those somewhere online with a little bit of searching.

I really hope at least some of my advice'll be helpful.

[Kortia]

That's really odd... There are windows CD-key changers... you should be able to find one, put it on a disk, boot her PC into safe mode (safe mode without network support SHOULD work even if windows isn't activated) After changing the CD-key to the brand new one you have, you should be able to activate windows from there (you'll have to call their line since internet will be disabled)

If you can't find a cdkey-changer (not sure about the legality of them. I would assume it'd be fine since you are changing it to a legal CD-key) you should at least be able to reinstall XP from there. It's not exactly recommended... but I do think it'd probably be fine.

Or if you have an old dos boot up disk you should also be able to run install from there. If you don't have a dos bootup disk you should at least be able to find those somewhere online with a little bit of searching.

I really hope at least some of my advice'll be helpful.

:eek3: I had the same issue. My mother board is a gigabyte, and what happend was it was not recognizing the keyboard! I have a USB Microsoft keyboard. I had to plug in a keyboard the old fashioned way and it worked!

So what was happening was when it got to the point it asked " click any key to boot from cd" it would not work.


Also remember when you install windows if you have already installed windows on it do the quick nfs install. the long version is only for brand new hard drives.

Hope that fixes your issue!

[Kortia]

P.S> My keyboard worked in the bios... It only stopped woirking at that one point, obviously a bug in gigabytes side. That is what threw me off... It only stopped working at the time I needed it to boot in Windows cd!