Disc boot failure

[insan3]

I'm trying to help a friend over the phone solve a computer problem, and the problem is that he bought a new CPU and motherboard for his computer, a gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L, and an intel q8400. Since he installed a new motherboard, he had to reinstall vista. When he tries to reinstall vista and reformat his drive, he just gets "disc boot failure" on a black screen. So he found another SATA drive with XP on it, went into XP and reformatted the hard drive from there, then went to reinstall vista, and when he selects "press any key to boot from CD" he still gets the disc boot failure screen, and now the XP disc is all screwed up and just gives the blue screen of death.

Any ideas on what we could do here?

 

[jefe323]

check your boot list and make sure your optical drive is at the top of the list

 

[insan3]

The optical drive is set at the top of the list in the BIOS.

 

[jefe323]

are you using a sata optical drive/hdd? check the connections (also make sure you your drives are connected to the sata connectors starting with #1)

 

[insan3]

Hi jefe thanks for the reply again. The optical drive and hard drive are both sata. They are both connected good, and a few different cables have been connected. weve also tried moving the drives to different sata slots, but still no luck.

 

[jefe323]

have you tried installing on a different/new hdd? have you tried a different dvd drive?