My PC will not boot up?

Question

My PC problem is that it will not bootup unless I have a CD in. If I do it will ask if I want to go to Windows or boot from CD. When I choose windows it starts up. Otherwise, I just a black screen with an awaiting cursor. What do you recommend?

Answer 1

When you first push the power button, look over the screen for a sentence that says something like push F10 to open settings.  After you did that, you have to be quick, you look for boot priority.  After you find it, make sure that the CD is not first.  Set your C drive, or your main hard drive.

Answer 2

Change your boot priority in your BIOS to read the HDD before the CD-ROM drive.

Answer 3

This happened to a friend of mine when we set up his computer with SATA as the primary hard drive.  It turned out, we had the hard drive plugged into the secondary SATA controller, and the CD drive plugged into the primary controller.  When it loaded, it was looking for boot.ini, ntldr.sys,  and whatever other files it needs to load.  With the CD in, it loaded the files and went on to load XP.  

What we did to fix it was just switch the SATA cables to make the hard drive plugged into the primary SATA-0.

I also read, while going through the problems with people on the internet, that it could just be that your startup files are missing or corrupt.  You could find out by starting up your computer, and checking C: to see that boot.ini, ntldr.sys are there and if not, copy them from the CD.

Hope it helps, it's usually easier to troubleshoot if you mention what was going on with the computer before the problem.  ;)

Answer 4

Here is a step by step instruction.

Turn your computer on. Hit the delete key until your BIOS screen comes up. It won't hurt your computer if you hit it more than once.

Once in the BIOS, check for a section that says something like "start-up order". Just make your HDD the first option.

You will need to change this if you ever want to boot from a CD.

Answer 5

try safe mode. if u get in try running anti-virus and anti-spyware apps ands search for rootkits. if that doesnt work do a system restore

also look at the BIOS settings, it should skip any boot devices that are not found