Hi everyone,
I just replaced mobo and cpu in my girlfriends dead computer. It has xp office on hard drive. When I powered up it runs bios and then beeps and stops asking if I want to start windows norm, safe mode, safe mode with prompts and network. No matter which one I choose it restarts and then goes right back to same spot. I tried starting up with the cd in drive and turning off hard disk but it tells me no os found.Any help would be great. Thanks

I understand the problem however make sure you don't make the confusion between the Windows XP Operating System and the Office XP Applications Suite which contains Word,Excel and Outlook.

In order to fix the issue that you are describing make sure you use the Windows Xp Operating System Reinstalation CD.

You will have to insert that disk in your cd drive and restart the computer. If the computer prompts you to Press any key to boot from the cd .. do that immediately.

If not you will have to change your BIOS settings to have the cd as the first boot device.

In order to go in BIOS you will have to hit F2, Del, F10 or F9 depending on the computer's manufacturer, every second while the system boots.

By the way what kind of system do you have? Dell, HP, IBM, E-machines, other?

If you are able to go into BIOS make sure the hard drive is on and that the CD Drive is setup as the first boot device..

If all that went well you could try a manual System Restore in Recovery Console: http://www.toughadmin.com/article.php?article=System

You could also try a System Repair and finally a complete OS Reinstall.

Hi, I only have the one disk I was hoping everything was on it but I guess not. The system is a custom build from someone else the mobo is an intel with a p2 cpu 256 gig ram 40 gig hd. The old mobo was also an intel with p2. Any idea why the windows won't go. I can get into bios. Thanks

Hello how do I get into recovery console?

To get into Recovery Console you really need that XP disk. There's no way whithout it.

Aside from the operating system corruption this problem might also be a hardware failure and in this case you don't need that cd.

Try booting only one memory stick at one time if you have two.

I tried booting with only 1 stick at a time but same problem.The last file windows reads is partition windows system 32/drivers/iomdisk.sys if that helps at all.In the mean time I'm going to dig around and try to find the xp start up disk. Also do you think it could be something in the config. of mobo that the old owner had setup diff. Thanks for any help you can give.

Hello, know I got bigger problems.I can't even get to bios know. When I power up it just beeps 4 times and nothing else. HELP!!!!!

At this point I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with either your motherboard or video card. I'm afraid you will not be able to fix it yourself.

Hey, I put the old mobo in , moved the video card to new slot and it booted right up. Thanks for all the help gemini. Its a good thing it worked because my other comp burnt up friday night. Any idea how I can get my files off of that hard disk. I tried putting it in this comp. but it would not boot it stops on windows partition 1 system 32 drivers mup something. It is an e machine. Thanks again for the help.

Hey I'm glad we solved that problem.

For the old hard drive problem now you have to slave it. That means that you change a jumper on the device on the slave position and you connect it on the same IDE cable with your main bootable hdd and then you should be able to see it as an extra partition.