[Kalitree]

Heyas =]
Slight backstory
Last night I was having a few problems after I'd recently installed an oldschool game I'd laying around. Just so happened to restart the computer after and just as it usually 'zones' into explorer.exe starting up, it seemed to freeze, so after a few restarts, safe mode and another restart it finally worked, but browsing My Computer seemed rather odd. Anyhoo, had been putting it off for a while and thought it time for a new start and saved up everything I needed and prepared myself for a lovely wee format and new installation of windows vista.

Anyhoo, done everything normally, changed the boot sequence for CD first, got to the part of the boot up screen where it came up 'Verifying dmi pool data' with 'Boot from CD' which I should probably mention, seems to increasingly lag each time I reach this point.
The first time it 'eventually' went to the section where you format the partition, and even loading the files on this screen took what seemed like forever compared to previous times...

So sat through quite a long format of one of my hard drives and the windows installation eventually started. When it was in progress I got a pop up to insert a service pack 2 disc. Now I may mention my mouse and keyboard (both USB and the older connector) weren't working at this point, although the keyboard was working for the start.

Anyhoo, I couldn't see how I could format the drive again as anytime I restarted the computer it would resume the installation, even with my old Windows XP disc in the drive. So, quite simply threw the Hard drive in another computer and formatted it that way.

Which brings me to where I am now...

Basically, when I mentioned before that it would hang at the following section:
Verifying DMI Pool Data..
Boot from CD..

It's now producing the following line:

NTLDR is missing, press ctrl+alt+delete to restart

Now I done a little looking into that, and as far as I'm aware, it means that the computer is unable to boot up from what I'm asking it to boot up from, the XP CD.

Has anyone any idea as to what I could be missing?
The only thing I can think of from writing this is that there's something faulty with the CD Drive and that its not reading the CD correctly, otherwise it should at the very least go to the formatting screen instead of being unable to boot up?

Found a few suggestions in other forums as to restoring some settings to default and removing and replacing RAM sticks, sadly nothing though =[

Cheers

[Kalitree]

Would love an edit button :P

Missed out that I'm missing that service pack CD and so gave up on the vista installation and am settling for the XP OS instead

[seahwk83]

Make sure to only have keyboard, mouse and monitor connected during setup (non usb if possible)

Reset BIOS Defaults and after resetting defaults, check BIOS again to make sure CD is first boot device and leave all everything, just check that/

Do you know if the drives are ATA or SATA?

Did you follow steps in link below?

How to Format Drive and Install Windows from Scratch
Lifehacker - Geek to Live: How to format your hard drive and install Windows XP from scratch - Feature

Post back if any errors or messages may come up

[Kalitree]

After about 6 hours of trying to sort something out with it, I tried something only to find it worked quite well.
I forgot like one of the most basic bloody computer solving techniques there are...
Smacked the keyboard in a little thing what can only be called 'Nerd Rage' and whadya know, fixed it.

So sitting with a copy of XP running, seems fine enough, but haven't had a proper session with it yet to determine if everythings fine, but at least there's an OS on =]