Man.. XP made installation so much easier than with Win 3.1 or 95. (Too young for anything older) Anyone remember those PITA autoexec.bat/config.sys memory resident programs for your mouse and cdrom? Bootable CDs are a godsend.

 

bootable cd's are great, but mine wont boot

 

i try to use the boot disks (floppy disks) and those dont boot properly.

i need some help, i'm desperate and irritated.

 

If your drives are recognizeable by CMOS, that just means that CMOS can find the identifying stamp on the drive controller. That does not mean that the drive or the controller is functioning properly. It is possible that your media might be bad, but if you have brand new untouched disks from MSFT, I would suspect a bad drive or drive controller. If it can't read your floppy drives either, I would not rule out a bad motherboard as the culprit.

At this point I believe that your swiftest course of action may be to contact the vendor of your PC. If you built the PC yourself, I would recommend contacting the vendors of your hard drive. Check your XP pro documentation, MSFT tech support keeps late hours. They may be of help too. I really think you need some real-time tech support with this issue. From what I can tell...all of the obvious suggestions have been made. At this point, the resolution may be a bit more involved than flipping a switch and making it go.

 

problem diagnosed!

it was a bad HDD and the windows XP disk was bad

SOULUTION: TRADED HDD and INSTALLED LINUX TO TEST
RESULT: HDD WORKS and INSTALL WENT SMOOTHLY

all that is needed now is a working Windows Xp pro disk.

Thank you everyone for all of your help. All of the info posted was great and thank you to the multiple posters who followed me through this process. THANKS!!!