[onlyoneman]

UPDATE:

so i found out that i was booting off of the second boot device, being the HDD because the disk is damaged...

anyone know if there is something on MS website that provides a download to ppl with an authentic cd key for their original software? if there is i cant find it.
any other suggestions?

[Judas]

this a fairly new machine?

because some boards are having some troubles initilizing the cd rom or vice versa fast enough to keep up with the rest of the computer.... usually having to go into the bios and set a boot delay of say 15 seconds.... This give the cd rom to load up... and the cd to be recognized allowing for the machine to read it and know "oh it's bootable"...

That's worth a try to see.

Otherwise the cd may be damaged.... or something else may be happening.

[onlyoneman]

this machine is actually about 2 years old.
when it boots it says its booting from the cd, i just dont get the menu where i select what i want to do.

im going to try what you suggested though, that seems like it may work somehow...cant hurt.

and to no avail...while i was at it i went ahead and disabled all other boot devices as kind of a troubleshooting thing..well it worked. the system wont boot from disk. it was kicking over to the second boot device. probably like you said because there are some minor scratches on the disk. they are minor enough that i didnt think they would matter, but i guess they do.

thanks. im off to see if MS provides a solution to damaged disks without having to drop another bill on an outdated OS...

[onlyoneman]

been looking for about 2 hours total and i cant find a thing. any intel would be GREAT!

think the live chat tech support will help me out? i could do that for free because i have a retail CD with CoA and CD key, so maybe they will let me leech a burnable WinXP image from them HAHAHAHAHAHA one can dream...

[Dyre Straits]

Just a thought pulled out of thin air.....

If you have a fairly old CD ROM drive...not a burner...and one that has a slow read speed...say 4X or so....try installing that as your device and see if, some how, it can read the installation CD well enough to get your OS installed.

Fingers crossed.

[onlyoneman]

Originally Posted by Dyre Straits

Just a thought pulled out of thin air.....

If you have a fairly old CD ROM drive...not a burner...and one that has a slow read speed...say 4X or so....try installing that as your device and see if, some how, it can read the installation CD well enough to get your OS installed.

Fingers crossed.

thats exactly what i eneded up doing...funny thing reading that now hahaa

only problem is that now i have some errors in windows and such...the bigest thing i have encountered is i cant open the "add/remove programs".
i get a parser message: "Value Creation Failed at line 451"

also im having problems with my DVD RW drive reading DVD data disks that i burned via Nero8 Burning ROM, which contain drivers and software and game patches and such. I know the discs are good. not only did i check them before i reinstalled XP, but i took them to another PC and popped them in and everything that i put on them is there, and opens and runs fine.
another interesting thing:
i actually had the DVDRW drive read a disc fine..ONCE..had problems with it before, and i cant get it to work again. And yes, the one it read was one that i had tried before and didnt work. It does however read CDs just fine, and my World Of Warcraft: Wrath of The Lich King DVD reads just fine...im at a loss.

Will the drive read...
-a Burned CD? yes
-a manufactured CD? yes
-burned DVD ? no
-manufactured DVD ? yes

any ideas? i have updated to the latest firmware for the

lite-on DVDRW shw-160P6S,

but i cant find drivers for it so i figure i dont need them. never had to install them before either.

EDIT:

i just found that the OEM software someone gave me is a UK version of XP Pro...dont know if that has anything to do with the price of tea in China...but it sure swaps some of the notaion on the keyboard around for me!

[Mr cairo]

Originally Posted by onlyoneman

i just found that the OEM software someone gave me is a UK version of XP Pro...dont know if that has anything to do with the price of tea in China...but it sure swaps some of the notaion on the keyboard around for me!

Just go to Control Panel - Regional and Language options - Keyboards and Languages - Change Keybords to sort that out

and the last time i couldnt boot of a CDrom i downloaded some boot disks to some floppy's and used them to get me started that seemed to work just fine

[Dyre Straits]

The problem you're having with that particular LiteOn DVD drive sounds like it's possible the drive is going bad. It's happened to me several times. They do fail and it sounds like this one is in the early stages of failing. Can you borrow another DVD burner to see if things work with that one?

[Judas]

if the CD-ROM drive is failing, IT could have possibly, although this is fairly rare to occur even with windows xp..... that the data is corrupted durring install or after..

i've seen some IDE drives cause havoc to the entire hardrive controller which caused the data on the hardrive itself to corrupt over time.

[onlyoneman]

yep. the copy of Win XP works perfectly on my Mom's machine, so im certain the drive is going bad. thanks guys.