[keerbear412]

I have an old gateway computer, I wanted to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows XP. I cannot get it to boot from cd! I have changed the cd/dvd burner-rom, I have changed the hard drive, and I keep getting "invalid boot diskette in drive: A". In the BIOS it is set to have the cd drive as primary boot device? Any recommendations? I have had this problem before and I can't remember for the life of me, how I fixed it then... Any help is greatly appreciated!!

[Body&Spirit]

Hi keerbear412

First is your bios up to date?

Second, do you have a floppy in drive A?

Third, are you accessing the proper area of your bios. Like in my bios, it has a section called "IDE configuration which shows the various drives on the cabling."

But the order in which the computer looks for a boot system is found in something like "Boot device priority" in which one can set the sequence that your computer will look for a bootable disk.

Finally, as a last resort, you may wish to look at my thread "Booting a CD from a floppy" in this Forum (Windows NT/2000/XP)

[Body&Spirit]

Hey Keerbear

Something just struck me. It has to do with your mentioning changing your hard drives and DVD drives.

Did you check the jumpers on these drives? Like the hard switches which denote whether it is a master, slave or cable select?

You may have problems if it is on the Slave ribbon while configured as a master or vice-versa.

If this is an issue, you may wish to configure everything as cable select as then it will not matter whether you connect the drive to the slave or master part of the ribbon. The computer makes the right selection.

This has nothing to do with the topic, but I assume you know the most efficient setup for attaching drives as a master or slave.

Brian

[keerbear412]

Thanks Body & Spirit,
I am pretty sure that the BIOS is more than likely NOT up to date, I am going to try this first. I am also going to check out your other thread. I actually did try to change the Jumpers on all of the drives both as master and as cable select, with no change, unfortunately... I will let you know what happens, THANK YOU!!!