First boot advice please.

[Gas'd Off]

Plea for advice......
I have boot nuked the HDD on my old workstation and now I cannot get Windows reinstalled. I do have some experience of this kind of thing but I'm stumped. I have used Darik's boot & nuke to wipe the HDD, so now I am using the boot floppies to initialise setup for winxp home. It runs through the install until it gets to the last disk when it asks "please wait" at which point it hangs? I have left if for a good 20mins and it's a reasonable spec machine so I don't think it's me being impatient. The floppy disk "active" light remains on too?
Any ideas IT gurus?
Thanks in advance

 

[Fanum]

Boot floppies??

I've never used them.......I just reformat the drive, make sure the cd drive is first boot source and whack in the XP disc.....resart and it boots drekkly off the CD.

I have got some universal boot discs you could try that I have used on everything up to w98 that i can email you if you like, but I don't think you should need a floppy for xp

 

[Fanum]

This might help.....

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q310994

 

[ianf]

why'd you 'nuke' it ? Virus or something? Was the bios suspect?

As Fanny says, go into the bios and make sure the cd/dvd player is above the HD in order and boot from the MS xp disk. Pretty well any drive/bios under 4-5 years old knows how to boot from cd.

Is it some odd MSDN version perhaps that you've burned and needs floppies to get going? (the only non-retail versions i've seen that needed this, and that was actually w2k.)

i.

 

[Gas'd Off]

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll see if I can get it to boot from the CD. It is a PC world special so I think its architecture is a bit odd(read cheap). I can't even get to the bios controls at the moment! Maybe it's knackered

 

[Fanum]

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll see if I can get it to boot from the CD. It is a PC world special so I think its architecture is a bit odd(read cheap). I can't even get to the bios controls at the moment! Maybe it's knackered

So what do you see when you power it up?????

Try the normal keys when it does for bios access....f8, f2, sometimes f11......

Does it go through the full p.o.s.t. routine???

And what does it stop on?

 

[Gas'd Off]

Hi Fanum,
I see words to the effect, "Missing operating system" or nothing but the cursor. I haven't tried F8 or F12 yet but the usual F2 is having zero effect, I'll try the others when I get back later. If no luck I think it may be simply Dud. but it was working fine before I nuked it. Re how far? it loads the boot disks fine and tells you what it's doing then when it gets to the last disk it just locks. I have tried xp, xp pro, win98 & win2000 boot disks, each does the same thing?
Thanks for the help