Windows XP Pro wont boot without CD in drive

abraveyabravey
edited June 2004 in Science & Tech
Dear all,

The other day my PC wouldn't boot up - it kept asking for the boot disk to be inserted.

It checked all the IDE drives, then paused, verified the DMI Pool data then goes and searches for floppy and the CD. If there isnt a CD in the drive it brings up the following message:

Realtek RTL8139 (A/B/C) / RTL 8130 PCI Fast Ethernet Contoller v 2.11
PXE - E61: Media Test Failure, check cable
PXE - M0F: Existing PXE ROM

I've tried repairing windows, reinstalling it, deleting, creating and formating the partition but no matter what I do everytime you restart the pc it asks for the bootdisk. If you ignore the prompt to boot from the CD then windows starts normally. although on device manager it sometimes brings up an error on something under network cards....Direct Parallel?

I'm not connected to a network or anthing, but it would let me log onto the internet - it dials, trys to register my PC and then stops and says a device isnt working properly.

I've not touched anything inside the pc and not really downloaded anything in a while - has anyone got any ideas?

Thanks very much

Al

Comments

  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited June 2004
    Clear the CMOS. Unplug the computer from the wall, open it up and take the tiny battery off the motherboard. Go have a beer or something, couple min, come back and out the battery back in. Try it again and tell us if it worked.
  • NecropolisNecropolis Hawarden, Wales Icrontian
    edited June 2004
    Before you do what mmonnin said try going into your bios and check your boot order. You may find that the network option is in there. Change it to hdd and re-boot your machine.
  • abraveyabravey
    edited June 2004
    The beer was good - the result was no change I'm afriad....bios is floppy, HDD and CD......any more ideas?

    Thanks

    Al
  • GobblesGobbles Ventura California
    edited June 2004
    1. are you running any type of raid?
    2. make sure your cables are in good working order
    3. go into the bios and verify that it is seeing your hard drives


    Gobbles
  • abraveyabravey
    edited June 2004
    At the moment I'm not running anything other than the bog standard XP. BIOS can see my hard drives and it recognises them on start up and in the recovery part of XP. My cables look ok....is it the HDD ones that I should be checking?
  • abraveyabravey
    edited June 2004
    Thanks for your help everyone - I went in and had a fiddle with the wires to make sure everthing was plugged in then tried repair windows again and to my joy it booted up. For some reason it couldn't see my second hard drive, so I unplugged the ribbon cable and plugged back in again and everything seems to be running whookay now.

    Thanks again

    Al
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