First I wanna say that this forum is very well put togeather. Been on automotive forums for years and it's hard pressed to come across one this well organized.

Anyway. I got around to putting a pc togeather out of spare parts I had laying around from old computers today. Figured it would serve as a decent back up pc or I could do things like surf the web while I play my games or something.

So yea. All the parts I used are no more than 2 years old. Got it all put togeather and it fired right up... except I can't get it to boot. I get "system unable to boot. Please insert boot disc and press enter" so I throw my xp disc in and it just goes to black screen with the little blinking line.

I figure this has to do with the hard drive... I used an 80gig maxtor hd. Now the hd wasn't formatted and had no new bios installed beforehand because when I took it out of the old pc I didn't plan to reuse it. But plans changed and I'm trying to find a way to get the bios I need and get the hd reformatted. I can't just throw it into a pc and dl the software so I'm kinda stuck on what I need to do.

Any help is appreciated

Hi Cpt Morgan, welcome to PCHF.

What happened when you initially put the XP CD in, does it go straight to a flashing cursor (strange), or did you manage to get through the initial setup first, rebooted, then flashing cursor (would make sense)?

it goes to the "can not boot" message and asks me to insert the boot disk. Once I put the boot disk in it just goes to the flashing cursor screen.

Also remember this is an unformatted used hard drive that I did nothing but take it out of one computer and put it into the other. Right now I'm at the manufacturer's site trying to dl a setup program onto a floppy so hopefully that works. I won't know for awhile though... dial-up sucks. Should be getting dsl up and running next week sometime

update:

well I found the original hd that came with the mobo. Threw that in and it got me at least to the windows screen where I could go into setup and such. I still couldn't get into windows itself though. Tried booting from the xp disc and such. no go... Any ideas?

well I got it up and running. Reformatting the hard drive as I type this. Hoping I can get xp back to square one with it and get all the useless **** I had on there off of it.

Although I'm probaby going to go back later and try to put the other hard drive in it because it's bigger by 20 gigs and I'd like to know how to make it work.

Anyway... enough thx for the help

Good work Cpt. EDIT: Marked as Resolved.