System boot issues

I can't help you any further with this. You should probably call in a pro to handle it 🤷
It could be a million different things, but I can't diagnose it from here. You really need someone on-site.

So, here’s the deal. My motherboard has two SATA ports, so I decided to daisy-chain things a bit—hooked up two cables to one hard drive and then used the other for a new DVD drive. I just popped in the disc, and everything seemed fine until that part where you have to hit Enter to kick off the installation. I press the button, and immediately it hits me with that error: "An operating system wasn't found. Try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system."

Anyway, thanks a million, man. You really helped me out a ton 😉

Come on, snap a pic of what's going on inside the case right now.

Perhaps that Windows version isn't a complete build, but more like an update package that checks for an existing installation on the Hard drive first.
If there is not having Windows, the process stops right there. I have never used an installation CD like that, so I doubt that is how it works.

It is also possible the CD/DVD is damaged. It worked yesterday and failed today. A single minor scratch can render it useless.

John Johnson15 said:Also, one more thing—if I'm hooking up a DVD drive and a hard drive to the same ribbon cable, can they actually share the same line?

Yeah, you can—provided you handle the jumpers on the devices correctly. You have to set them as either master or slave; if you leave them both on the same setting, you're going to have a bad time because only one of them will actually show up. Just check the jumpers on the back of the hard drive and the optical drive—set the drive to master and the optical drive to slave, and you should be good to go.

So, I managed to sort out my DVD issue, but there’s this weird thing happening right at the start. As soon as I boot everything up, it shows it's loading the DVD and the hard drive, but then it just kicks me out. It gives me some error about disconnecting a device because maybe the memory on the tape drive is full or something. I guess it's just being finicky.

The motherboard has two IDE slots, so I went ahead and hooked up one hard drive to one ribbon cable and the DVD drive to the other. Everything seemed fine at first—IDE was behaving normally during the initial stages. But here’s where it gets annoying: once I get to the part where I have to hit Enter to kick off the Windows installation, I press the key and then suddenly I'm getting this error message about memory issues.

It’d be pretty helpful if you could just tell us the exact error code you're seeing. Saying something like "it's acting like I need to unplug a device because the memory on the strip is full" doesn't really tell us anything at all, I guess.

An operating system wasn't found. You might want to try disconnecting any drives that don't actually contain an operating system.

Anything new?