Having trouble booting from Disk

[greymatter]

Recently I was given a desktop without a hard drive from a friend. I'm attempting to install a fresh copy of windows onto a hard drive of mine. However, I'm having trouble booting windows from the disk. When it tries to load windows it says: DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

Which seems like it's still trying to boot from the Hard Drive.

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-8I915G Duo.

In Bios under Advanced Bios Features, I have First Boot Device set to CDROM, and have the second and third boot devices disabled.

I'm using IDE cables that worked previously in the machine, and it seems to recognize that there is a CD/DVD Rom drive during boot up. I'm using a CD/DVD Rom drive that I know works in my old machine. The windows bootable disk works in the older machine as well.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[GhislainG]

You get "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" because the hard disk is not in the list of bootable devices. Set the CD/DVD as the first device and the hard disk as the second one. When the system reboots during installation, it will find the hard disk and continue the installation process.

 

[greymatter]

If I set the Hard Drive as a boot device I get the message "NTLDR is Missing Press any key to restart"

Which sounds like it's still going directly to the hard drive and skipping the CD drive. Removing the Hard Drive from the boot device list was a desperate attempt to have it notice the CD drive.

Could it be some hidden setting in Bios? Or maybe it requires some sort of motherboard specific boot disk?

 

[GhislainG]

The specs for that motherboard are:

# 1 x UltraDMA 100/66 IDE
# 2 x UltraDMA 133 IDE (For HDDs only)

Is your CD/DVD connected to IDE port #1? IDE Port #2 won't work. Then your hard disk should be connected to IDE port #2 on it's own 80-pin IDE cable.