Can enter setup but can not change anything in

More than likely the hard drive has crashed, swap the old hard drive out with a new one and then use the reinstall discs. Did you have any files you needed off the old drive?

Its probably trying to boot from your external drive.

Go into your bios and reset your boot setting to HDD0 as your first boot device, Disk drive 0 second and floppy third, unless you want to boot from an external drive. That being the case select an appropriate order.

If the bios shows your external HDD as HDD0, then you have to work out which is the drive carrying the operating system and set that to your first boot device.

To get into the bios, watch the boot screen for a key to hit to enter setup, normally its the "DEL" key.

you need to detect your harddisk in bios setup.
For that when you power up the computer press "del" key to enter in bios.
Then check your harddisk is detected in bios.
If not cxheck power cable and ide or sata cable connected to harddisk.
Reconect both connection to harddisk then check.

Have you contacted the manufacturer of Final Draft, and explained that you replaced the hard drive and reloaded the software? If they cannot (or will not) help you, then perhaps there is a work around. Does your old hard drive work? Assuming it does, I suggest you get a product called Norton Ghost, and clone your old hard drive contents onto your new hard drive, then run from the new hard drive. The upside to that is, you will not lose anything from the old drive. The downside is, if you wanted to reformat or start with a fresh OS, you cannot. But, if your old OS was bug free and ran fine, then there shouldn't be any issue there. You might also just try to copy the customer number from the old hard drive and re-enter it on the new hard drive, (again, i am assuming the old hard drive still works). those are 2 things you could look into.

You can't insert a Hard drive from another PC because when it was installed on the old PC it was setup to work with the hardware for that particular computer.

You will need to reinstall a fresh copy of windows on it to make it work with the new PC it's in.Boot from CD run windows setup, format the drive then do a fresh install.

This should fix the problem, if you have any new info or need further help with any of that post back. Thank you for choosing Fixya!

Hi there.

Now, turn on your friends laptop, and access the BIOS/Setup menu. Have a look through the options, find the one that says something like Boot Virus Protection. Disable it. You can't install any operating system if this is Enabled. Then look for the Boot Priority or Boot Devices option. Change this, so it boots from CD-ROM first. Then try to install XP again.

Let me know if this works.

U mail is noted friend.. U all files and foeld is xchange the new Windows Server 2003, than no problem..

NO its a software crash use the installation disk you said you used......go through the blue screen allowing windows to boot up from that disc let it go right to the end and press "R" for the console (the dos line ) when there enter ....     chkdsk /p

Let Windows fix any problems. When finished remove the disc and I bet it will open windows for you.  Please come back and tell me how did you do because most people that I helped with this problem just run but you know old saying "what goes around comes around"

the first thing that u replace the hard drive right from ur pc to the one u got from ur friend>what happend is ur hard drive is configured for ur mother board>and the mother board of the pc that u got from ur friend is configured for the hard drive so u can not use ur hard drive untill u format it

hi! i have a prob with my pc its an DELL GX OPTIPLEX 270. It doesn't work in the boot, it lunch me a message at the first screen (strike f1 to retry boot, f2 for utilities). I have try many solution but it doesn't work. So, plz if any one can help me to solve my pc.
i'm waiting for and thx.