I have installed windows 8 pro, from windows xp.
Everything works good, but if I boot without the Windows 8 DVD in the drive, it comes up to the blue screen, giving me the options "f8", and so on.
If I have the DVD in, it just bumps past it, and boots up to windows 8 fine.
Any help would be really appreciated.
No, I did not format the drive. I think part of the problem is I have multiple drives. I have an "M:" drive which holds all my music, and unfortunately it seems to make this the drive it "boots" to, before going to "c:" for the windows. I have reinstalled successfully about 5 times now, and also ran repair with ne help.
I would install windows 8 from scratch if I wanted to lose all my settings, which I don't. Do you think I need to remove my "m:", which I think windows 8 considers the "first" partition, and then rerun setup? Or is it a bios problem? It seems like it doesn't want to read my "m:" for the "bcd" file. Can I tell it to look somewhere else for the "bcd" file?
Any help is welcome, and thanks for your response Mike.
David.
David, if you have the option in your BIOS make sure that your "C" drive is listed as the first hard drive. Also when you go to rerun the setup of Windows 8, unplug all your other hard drives. That way it cannot write files to any other drive besides "C". If it still fails after that, you will most likely need to do a complete install. Format the C drive prior using the Windows 8 DVD and then do the install. After the install has completed remember to plug your other hard drives back in.
With multiple disks you need to go into BIOS and set the disk that you are installing windows onto as first disk in the disk boot priority order. Windows installer puts the files necessary to boot the OS on the MBR of the first disk in the hard disk boot order. This is true even if the first disk is not the disk you are installing windows onto.
This may or may not be all or part of your problem.
Also the term "drives" and "disks" are not one and the same. In windows partitions are named with letters, i.e. C:, D:, E:, etc. But these terms are not necessarily separate hard disks (drives). Example: you can have a single hard disk partitioned with 3 partitions. In windows depending on your hardware setup they will be assigned a letter. For this example I will use C:, F: and G:. These are not "drives" in the literal sense because they all reside on the same hard disk. They are actually partitions on a hard drive (disk). I tend to stay away from calling partitions drives as that is not always the truth. Coming from Linux it is a basic concept and the disk and partition nomenclature makes much more sense. Disks are labeled sda, sdb, sdc,etc. partitions are labled by what disk they are on such as sda1, sda2, sda3, sdb1, sdb2, sdb3, etc. This decreases the misinterpretations of disk and drive and there is no mistaking a partition for a "drive"..
