Hellllp mee plzz :)

[Darkstar69]

hiya im pretty new to the whole scene of building computers and iv spent an awful lot of money on my system and im a bit stuck what i should do next..it may be a simple answer it may not but thanks for reading it anyway :)

My motherboard and CPU is an AMD Dual Core 5000 Athlon 64 motherboard bundle.
i have an optical drive (DVD and CD)
HDD (Hitachi deskstar) 400GB. 'Sata'
2GB of RAM

i have the priorities set up correctly i think, the Optical as the master & the HDD as the slave.

The computer recognises all the hardware but when i boot up i get as far as the screen saying

'disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter'

i feel i need to buy Vista OS but is it as that stage i should begin installing it?

Thankyou Darkstar69

[The New Normal]

If your hard drive does not have an OS installed, then install one you must.

Installing an OS requires formatting the drive, so make sure there's nothing on there you want before hand. With a 400GB drive, I'd think about making 2 or 3 partitions, with windoze on one, and storge on the other(s). You do this at the start of the install process.

A google search may help explain some of these things.

[compdoc]

hiya im pretty new to the whole scene of building computers and iv spent an awful lot of money on my system and im a bit stuck what i should do next..it may be a simple answer it may not but thanks for reading it anyway :)

My motherboard and CPU is an AMD Dual Core 5000 Athlon 64 motherboard bundle.
i have an optical drive (DVD and CD)
HDD (Hitachi deskstar) 400GB. 'Sata'
2GB of RAM

i have the priorities set up correctly i think, the Optical as the master & the HDD as the slave.

The computer recognises all the hardware but when i boot up i get as far as the screen saying

'disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter'

i feel i need to buy Vista OS but is it as that stage i should begin installing it?

Thankyou Darkstar69

'disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter' usually means that there is no operating system on the HDD it's time to install one.

one other thing if the HDD is a SATA drive then there is no master or slave the cable for a SATA drive will only connect one drive at a time.

if the cd/dvd drive and the hdd is connected to the same cable then that is an EIDE drive, In that case I would check the motherboard to see how many EIDE interfaces there are either 1 or 2, if you have 2 seperate the hdd and the cd/dvd between the 2, if you have 1 then I would make the hdd the master and the cd/dvd the slave.