Major Problem with my 1330!!

Hi All

OK this is the problem, formatted my hard drive totally. Now I'm attempting to install Vista Ultimate via the DVD (Original disk) I can’t get it to boot from the DVD.

I do press F12 and select CD/DVD from the option what happens is the cursor flashes in the top left area of the screen then after about a minute I get the message:

No Boot on internal Hard Drive

No bootable devices - Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 to setup utility press F5 to run onboard diagnostics.

Have gone into the bios and changed the boot order... No luck

Have run F5 diagnostics .... DVD is all OK

Seems as if it attempts to boot from the windows DVD because I can here it spinning then stops.


HELP!!!

Thanks

Carl

 

The reason it's not booting the DVD is because there's no drivers installed yet for your optical drive - that's why it's telling you there's no boot devices available. The spinning you hear is just the system going through the motions of checking for a bootable device.

You need to install your optical drive first, but there's the catch - unless you put the files on a flash drive to boot from, you've got a problem. You can't run an optical drive install disk from an optical drive that isn't installed unless the install disk is itself bootable. So you need to either find your original drive install disk or get the files online from the vendor and put them on a disk or flash drive if they're bootable files, which they likely are.

The other option is to get a 16gb Sandisk Cruzer FD, which you can use to boot applications from. You can always try and copy Vista to it and then try booting from there.

 

You should be able to boot into your optical drive regardless of drivers.

Do you have any other bootable cds?

 

Hi
I've tried both the Vista 64 Ultimate and Vista Home edition Both original disks.
Still no boot.
I have the original Dell disks and I can boot from a USB stick as that's how I have formatted the hard drive via Kill Disk.

How would I install the drivers for the DVD from a USB stick or what I might do is create a bootable USB and copy the Windows DVD to the USB stick and install it that way. what do you think?

Thanks

Carl

 

After you select the CD/DVD drive as the bootable device,

there will be a message

'Press any key to boot from DVD/CD'

If you don't press any key it will attempt to boot from the hard drive.

 

That's a very ellaborate explanation, but it's not true. You can boot from the CD/DVD without any drivers. You could do that for many years -- the BIOS has the drivers, if you will.

If you think about that, it makes no sense what you are saying. Where would you install drivers on a newly formatted disk. There is no Windows....

 

No I dont even get that message, cursor flashes in top left corner of the screen for about 1 min then I get the error message.

any more ideas?

Cheers

Cheers

 

Are you sure your DVD is bootable? Not all are, for example the MSDN ones usually aren't.

 

Hmm... this might just be a shot in the dark, but if you've changed the boot order in the BIOS, did you save the configuration settings before rebooting? It should give you an option to do so. This is a noobish answer, I know... but something that might be potentially throwing a monkey wrench into your installation plans.

Otherwise, I'd think your optical drive is borked somehow and you might have to get a new one. Wouldn't make sense if the BIOS is detecting it, though. Hrm.

 

Hi
Boot Order is saved in Bios just checked..

thanks

 

try the followng...:

start the computer up
strike F12 (or whatever, to select the boot-device)
put in the DVD
let the DVD spin up and spin down, before hitting enter (you've selected DVD as boot)
then strike another key (to start the installation program)

The thing is, on the matsu-s-h-i-t-a dvd-drive (which I have on my M1330) that the DVD-drive is a bit slow to recognize that there'sa bootable DVD in the drive. So, I have to let the DVD be recognized first, before I select to boot off the DVD - otherwise it might skip the DVD and try to boot off of the harddrive instead. A bios-fault I would say, as the BIOS isn't programmed for a long enough time delay before proceeding on a no-DVD-media-present-error. Try this, if it doesn't work, call Dell