Compaq Presario C302NR will not boot up.

[dapapers1]

Hey guys my Presario C302NR was running fine for the last 2 year with no problems. I shut it down for the night and when I turned it back on the next day it went to the windows xp logo screen then flashes a blue screen with a message momentarily then immediately goes to the load windows normally or safe mode menu. I clicked every option and it start the booting process over again and comes right back to the same screen. So I went into the bios and did a hard drive diag self test and it passes every time. So I took my Xp disk and tried to reinstall it running from the disk, I get a message saying no hard drive found. I buy a new drive put it in and I get the same result as the other and that drive also pass the self test. What give I am clueless now could that be another bad drive or am I looking at the wrong hardware.

[Lsdmeasap]

Is your BIOS hard drive options set to AHCI or RAID? If so you will need to load a driver during the install using the F6 option

[dapapers1]

Ok I ried it again and this time hit F6, then it load a bunch of drivers etc. The i still came to the same message something about cnnot find a hard drive location.

[Lsdmeasap]

You will need to check what your drives are set to in the BIOS, what Mode? If they are AHCI or RAID you will need a specific driver, that is not on your Driver CD's.

I would assume the setting IS either AHCI or RAID, and if so you will need to check first if you have two physical drives. If not then you know RAID should not be set, as for AHCI or not, that is up to you. You can set it to not be AHCI if you like and it would be fine, and no drivers would be needed.

You will also need to move your drive by name to the top of Hard Disk Boot Priority, that is not boot order priority either.

If you like, please post me some images of your BIOS, and open your case and look to see how many hard drives you have

Reinstall may not be needed, repair maybe, or you may just need to set your BIOS settings to the proper setting and your old XP may load up if you never got a partial install started