trouble formatting hard drive

[teamzissou]

trying to format a harddrive and i run vista on one hard drive and xp on the other. trying to format the drive with xp on it. tried just putting the install disc in and format the drive through that and reinstall xp but it wouldnt boot from the cdrom. went into the bios and gave the cdrom drive first boot priority still wont boot from cd. so then i formatted it through vista. go to install xp on that drive and and it goes through post and then says
BOOTMGR missing press ctrl+alt+dlt to restart. try to press ctrl+alt+dlt keyboard wont respond. help me please!:jawdrop:

my system:
amd athlon 64x2 3ghz
foxconn c51xe nforce 590 mobo
2gig ddr800 ocz ram
xfx 8600gt
2 western digital 320gig

[Methious]

Faulty XP disk would be my GUESS, try downloading a good XP disk and use your legal XP key to activate it. As long as it's the same version XP your key will work.

Given that you can boot to Vista, but not boot the XP disk it's probably faulty.

[srpeters18]

And it sounds like your boot manager was on the XP drive as well. You might try your Vista disk to repair the installation, so at least you can get to Vista.

[tyle6]

You could also try a boot loader. Grab a copy of a linux live CD, such as ubuntu, and use the bootloader on the disc to boot your drive with vista on it. This wont fix your problem yet get you into your OS.

[teamzissou]

i can use the drive with vista on it thats what i am using now. i just cant get the drive that had xp on to boot from the cd.

[Methious]

That's what I'm telling you unless it's the hard drive that's jacked it's the XP CD that's taking a dump on you.

You can boot the Vista DVD to the DVD drive so you know the DVD drive isn't to fault. (probably dvd drives can get weird) So if the XP CD isn't booting the CD is messed up. If you boot from an alternative media and try to install XP with the boot portion of XP messed up it might install but not boot.

So your back to where I originally told you download that same version of XP and use your legal key to activate it. That's the only way to eliminate the Xp disk as the culprit other than trying to install it on another machine and possibly jacking up the other machine too.

[Dragon_CPU]

You cant format it with vista and install xp on it as vista writes info on the drive. What you can do is a couple of things. First how are your drives configured IDE cable? Sata IDE? or Sata Raid? If you are running lets use SATA IDE mode then you can use vista to delete the complete partition on the other drive so it has no info stored then DISABLE the Vista drive in BIOS just to install XP on the other drive. See if that lets you install Xp completely if so after installing XP then ENABLE your other drive. If you try to install XP and it still craps out on you then like the others said it is either a bad XP disc or HDD. I will lean toward the HDD as I've had a similar issue before. If your using IDE cable (hopefully not) you can still do this the same way as i said with the SATA ide mode. However Raid is a Different story so lets let you respond and try this first.

Also the reason I say erase the complete partition and Disable the Vista drive in bios, is so when you do boot the XP disc it will go right into what it needs to do to the HDD and you will be able to Partition and format it with XP. Another way to do this and this works best just leave it plugged up and disable the Vista HDD in bios. <--------Just do it this way.

[tyle6]

You can boot the Vista DVD to the DVD drive so you know the DVD drive isn't to fault

Not true at all my man!!, DVD drives have two lenses... well any drive that can play CD's and DVD's has two lenses. A CD laser lense and a DVD laser lense. when one blows it will not effect the other in any way.

So in other words just because a DVD plays doesn't mean the CD lenses isn't toast.