Member Avatar for arufafa

hie every body out there

i have a dell dimesion 2350 that wont boot after a clean installation of windows xp professional with sp2.it has been displaying an error message of (NO BOOT DEVICE DETECTED) but i did some check ups and found out that my hard drive its okay(if i put it on different pc).i was using a bootable copy of xp

this is the order of boot devices in my bios,CD ROM ,HARD DRIVE and the rest are disabled.

pliz help fast

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Bob_180_Bob

Dani AI

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As reported the machine shows "NO BOOT DEVICE DETECTED" after an XP install, and with and already checking drive type and basic BIOS/repair ideas, the next steps should target two areas they haven't fully covered: the physical IDE/interface layer (jumpers, cable, power, channel) and the disk's boot code/partition flags.

Quick hardware checklist to run now (power down first):

  • Reseat or swap the IDE cable; try a known-good 80‑wire cable and put the drive on the cable end (the end connector should be the master).
  • Check the drive jumper: if it's the only drive on that cable set it to Master (or Single); if two drives are present ensure one is Master and the other Slave (or both set to Cable‑Select if the cable supports it).
  • Try the drive on the other IDE channel on the motherboard and attach the power connector from a different cable/PSU lead. These steps eliminate cable/jumper/power problems that let the disk spin and show geometry but still prevent booting.

If hardware looks OK, repair the boot code from the XP Recovery Console (boot from the XP CD, choose Recovery Console). Run, in this order:

fixmbr
fixboot c:
bootcfg /rebuild
chkdsk /r

fixmbr and fixboot rewrite the master boot record and the partition boot sector; bootcfg /rebuild recreates boot.ini and chkdsk /r finds filesystem errors. Use these only after confirming you have no important unbacked data (there is a small risk when rewriting MBR).

If that still fails, attach the drive to a working PC and use Disk Management to verify the Windows partition is present and marked Active (or run DiskPart to set the partition active). Also try a different, known-good XP install disc (sometimes modified "bootable" copies skip/alter boot code). If all else fails, report exact BIOS messages and whether the drive is shown on POST so the next steps (BIOS settings, Dell-specific quirks, or a controlled reformat/reinstall) can be suggested.

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Member Avatar for Freaktech

Are you using IDE or SATA hard drive?

Member Avatar for Bob_180_Bob

I assume that windows found your hard drive when it restartes 2 - 3 times during instalation.
Start by changing your bios back to HD ist boot, CD 2nd
Bob
If at first you don't succeed...don’t try skydiving.

Member Avatar for arufafa

hey guys im using an IDE hard disk drive and every time i check the hard drive in cmos appears okay beause i can see the geometry of the hard drive

Member Avatar for Bob_180_Bob

hey guys im using an IDE hard disk drive and every time i check the hard drive in cmos appears okay beause i can see the geometry of the hard drive

Have you changed the boot to HD 1st, if so, have you tried to start in safe mode? If it still wont work you might try starting the installing windows again and at the window where it finds your previous version do you want to repair, press "R" and see if that works.

Bob
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This morning I took a lie detector test, no I didn't.

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