[shuabert]

Hmm...well there's part of the problem. My BIOS isn't reading any drives so it won't boot from the cd or the hard drive. Under "Main" it says "Primary IDE Master: Not Detected" "Primary IDE Slave: Not Detected".

Any ideas?

[Carbon]

Loose cable, no 4-pin power to what's plugged into IDE, bad master/slave settings (try cable select).

[shuabert]

I checked all those things and they all seem fine. I can't figure it out.

[shuabert]

I just switched the drive settings from Cable Select to Master/Slave and it fired up no problem. Apparently in trying to downgrade from three drives to two (this motherboard only has one IDE slot on it and my drives won't take SATA cables) I must have forgotten to try that.

I'll let you know how things go.

EDIT: Hmm...I got to the windows setup screen and after about three minutes it gave me a blue screen of death. It told me to restart the computer and try again and see if it works the second time. I got the same message the second time:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:
Check to be sure you have adequate disc space. If a driver is identified in the stop message, disable the driver or check with manufacturer for driver updates. Try changing video adapters.
Check with your hardware vendor for any BIOS updates. Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing. If you need to use safe mode to remove or disable components, restart your computer, press f8 to select advanced startup options, and then select safe mode.
Technical information: ***STOP: 0x0000007E (0xc0000005, 0xF748E0BF, 0xF78DA208, 0xF78D9F08)***
pci.sys - Address F74E0BF base at F7487000, DateStamp 3b7d855c


The part about adequate disc space rings a bell as my C:/ partition (where I had windows installed before) was running low before my computer died. But I don't know how to fix that now; is there a way to wipe the C:/ drive before I try to install Windows? Right now I just started the disc with the old OS still in place.

[shuabert]

Grr..well I've had no luck finding the key and I went ahead and did a reinstall using a slipstreamed disc with SP2 which got me past the boot error. Unfortunately I can only get as far as the part where you have to enter the product key. I tried some tricks online that were supposed to show you the key written in the disc itself, but so far no luck with that. Does anyone know if you can get the key from the actual cd? There is no previous install anymore to try to get it from so if not I'm pretty much hooped. Can one call MSoft to get the key?

[solosdk]

Try all of them. Don't get mad if one doesn't work. Try the bottom one first.

[solosdk]

I can also give many keys for Microsoft Office etc.... Just ask me!

[Hybr!d]

Do not post keys for software, consider this a final warning, thanks.

[solosdk]

well sorry , Im new and I didn't know. and whats wrong with that? and he also asked for the keys.