Can't boot to CD, XP won't load

[Eric]

Have a friend who's having some complications installing XP.

He bought a brand new harddrive and is trying to boot to the CD to install XP on it. Everytime he puts in the system disk, it says it's not bootable or it's the wrong type of CD. But for some reason it worked 1 time last night, and halfway through copying files over it just up and rebooted, and it wont work anymore.

The CD-Drive is also new, but I guess there is a chance of it being defective.

What would cause these kinds of errors, besides faulty hardware? Everything being new kind of leaves me to believe it's got to be a problem with the CD, but the one time it booted contradicts that. So it seems to be a hardware error, but he can't tell.

Any insight?

[mick_f]

My first test would be to see if the disk will boot on another system to rule that out

[syphus]

What is the exact error Eric? Word for word.

[Eric]

Originally Posted by syphus

What is the exact error Eric? Word for word.

It's whatever error you get when you try to boot from a non-bootable disk. He's asked me so many questions though I can't remember exactly where he's stuck anymore. At first he had the wrong RAM, then he bought a new mobo, now I think he's installed XP correctly but everytime he logs in, it logs him back out automatically.

Unfortunately I haven't talked to him in 2-3 days now, been so busy. I'll have to ask him Monday if he has another problem or not, and re-itterate it back here if I don't know the answer. It's not like he's clueless as to what he's doing, just having a hard time communicating it to me...so when I try to tell it to someone else it's just all jumbled.