dayofdefeat909

i'm wondering if the cd-rom/dvd/rw combo drive that i have is busted. i recently zeroed my hard drive and now i'm trying to reinstall windows xp pro with sp1. i've tried booting using the 6 xp pro sp1 boot disks and the OEM cd which came with the computer. the first time i booted from the OEM cd and it worked fine. i deleted the main partition, reformatted to NTFS and then i got an error message saying "the computer cannot find file ASMS'. i've read this is related to problems the computer has in recognizing and communicating with the cd-rom. i next booted from the 6 floppy disks. all went fine until it asked me to insert the windows xp pro sp1 cd. i do this and it just keeps blinking that i need to insert the CD. i've never had problems with the cd-rom until i now. the interesting thing is, the computer booted from the cd-rom the first time and then i reformatted the hard drive where i wanted to install windows. did i mess something up? i'm under the impression that computers can have a blank hard drive and are set up so that they can boot from anything the BIOS supports. my BIOS supports all the methods i tried so is the cd-rom busted?

now, the above two steps failed, so i zeroed the hard drive and started anew. now i can't boot from the cd-rom at all. i can boot from the 6 xp floppy start up disks, but after i insert disk 6, after loading for a bit, i get a blue screen telling me that there has been an error, UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME, and that the computer needs to shutdown. i'm guessing that is a problem with the cd-rom because if the cd-rom were busted, the system would not be able to mount the cd properly and then read the data off it.

is it the cd-rom simply toasted or am do i have more serious problems?

laboye

It depends. If you have a removable CD-ROM drive remove it and try starting up off of the disks then. See if it gives you a different error. If it goves you the same error, you have a major problem. Possibly the IDE controller or something on the motherboard.