wierd win xp bootable cd problem

my windows xp bootable cd on booting shows "press any key to continue....
setup is inspecting....." after that the screen goes blank.i tried my friend's xp cd also with same results.please help me.

Your Master Boot Record has gone bad. Connect your Hard drive to some other computer, and remove all the partitions.
Repartition and format again. Now connect the HD to your computer and XP setup will work properly.

Lucky_star said:
Your Master Boot Record has gone bad. Connect your Hard drive to some other computer, and remove all the partitions.
Repartition and format again. Now connect the HD to your computer and XP setup will work properly.

he says problem is wid booting off windows xp cd and u say the mbr has gone bad??!! then u suggest him to format, repartition??!!!! whoa!!

do one thing, disconnect ur hdd and try booting off the cd. even the cdrom drive cud be the culprit. do other CDs read and copy properly? u may even try resetting the bios settings to their default and try.

since u've tried wid ur fren's xp cd too, the problem seems to wid ur hardware or settings.

IR dude, I have faced this many times. Sometimes unistalling Kaspersky damages the MBR. And XP bootable CD isn't detected anyway, once the mbr goes bad. No need to remove all partitions. Just delete the active partition, assign a new primary partition and make it active. That's it.

^^^let him confirm before deleting the partition. coz if he does that and problem turns out to be something else then he'll hafta reload everything. thats a real pain. thats why i asked him to disconnect the hdd and try booting. try connecting some other hard disk. that'll clear things up.

L

I had simmillar problem and all I did was make sure Bios had correct settings for and then I removed a jumper on HDD. and then I booted to recovery console and did fixmbr. took me a while but when I finally got it, it was a lot beter then refrmatting

But the problem is sometimes winxp cd doesn't bring up "recovery console" prompt.

A

see if ur hdd is bad.

my hdd is ok as i already have a working copy of xp on it.my xp copy is installed abt 4 years ago and so some of files are corrupt.i have to repait it.
i have resetted bios settings and my cdrom is quite good as it doots fedora cd's well and good.

L

so you can boot into winodws then? did you try a sfc /scannow? is there a I386 folder on your c: Drive? if not copy from the CD and install on c:. boot to safe mode with command prompt... c:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons. or you can run this command from within windowsXP d:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons (d: being your cd drive)(next time u boot up should give you option to enter recovery console.

abhinandh said:
my hdd is ok as i already have a working copy of xp on it.my xp copy is installed abt 4 years ago and so some of files are corrupt.i have to repait it.
i have resetted bios settings and my cdrom is quite good as it doots fedora cd's well and good.

worth thinking 4 years ago u had XP! i got it around 2005

<edit>
post ur config plz

spironox said:
worth thinking 4 years ago u had XP! i got it around 2005

<edit>
post ur config plz

512mb ddr2
intel 945
p4 3.2ghz

guys just did a ram test using windows memory diag and all the tests failed.what does this mean.i had a psu failure abt a week ago.since then xp cd not booting,frequent restarts.and also recovery console is not starting.....

what does it mean?ram fried???

This problem arises due to bad cds. When i had win xp, i copied the cd. The original cd from which i copied worked but the copy didn't work even on my frnds pc. Copying was successful though.

The Unknown said:
This problem arises due to bad cds. When i had win xp, i copied the cd. The original cd from which i copied worked but the copy didn't work even on my frnds pc. Copying was successful though.

one soulution is above

Lucky_star said:
Sometimes unistalling Kaspersky damages the MBR.

is it so ?

^^Yup, sometimes they do damage the MBR. Read it on their forums. Faced the same problem twice until I found this tool from their site, which unistalls it safely.

^^ thanks for the info and the link also