got another question for you guys.
I am trying to load an empty hard drive on my friends laptop and it is saying "Missing Operating system" I have a Windows XP CD in the drive and I set it to run from that drive first. Anyone know what's going on? Why won't Windows XP start up it's setup?

 

something with the Master Boot Record maybe.... Is it a new hard drive or just a re-newed one? The Master boot program at the beginning of the hard drive displays "missing operating system" message when it cannot find the active partition on the hard drive or the boot record on that partition. You MUST partition a hard drive to prepare it for use and load a new OS. boot from a startup disk that has Fdisk.exe on it (probably on your XP CD) and enter it at the command prompt It will bring you to a menu where you just follow directions. you'll most likely make drive C: your active partition (which is the partition used to boot the OS). good luck, and if you need any help just ask

 

ooops!!! i forgot were talking about XP, so fdisk won't work, but you don't need it anyways. I read your question over again and i think i know whats up. forget all that crap ^^^^ above. if the pc isn't booting from the cd, go to a command prompt and enter D:\i386\winnt.exe. you should come to a setup screen where you'll have to do the partitioning and all that stuff. this should get you on your way to finishing the install. if it doesn't work, it's probably something with the Master Boot Record or whatever i said in the last post. good luck, again.....

 

sometimes a fresh drive doesnt have the drivers for a cd drive. SOMETIMES

 

Are you totally sure you're booting from the cdrom???? Is it a burned copy of XP? Sometimes you can't burn from a burned copy. When you look into the BIOS settings, does the laptop recognize the hard disk??

 

an empty drive will have jack squat for drivers.

The missing OS message you're getting sounds more like the cd drive having problems recognizing the XP cd. Some laptop drives can be a bit finicky when it comes to non-stamped (ahem) cd's, but if it's an original disk, sometimes reinserting the cd into the drive can let the drive recognize the cd again. A telltale sign is, do you hear the cd drive spin up slightly when the cd is inserted (do this with the power on, of course. ignore the missing os message). Or does the drive just go "squirt squirt" like it can't find a track? If it's the latter, you might be sol. The cd rom drive might need replacing.

 

If you are sure that the CD drive works, and in the BIOS the CD drive is the first boot drive, and yet it still doesn't prompt you to boot from the CD....

Then you either do not have a bootable Windows install disk, the CD and CD drive don't play well together, or the CD drive is hosed.