Computer Tech Help please

[KirtViza]

Ok so heres the story, My lil sis got a new laptop and I took her old Computer whos hard drive went to shit, So i formatted and now its missing something I dont know what but whatever I dont care. So I go in Steal the CDR, and the floppy cause mines white in a black case and hers is black, heres the problem she had a 512 stick ddr and I wanted to add it to mine, now my board supports four sticks yet when I put it in, It booted up normally and all that jazz, said I had a gig and a half, then windows wouldnt boot up, so I restart.....and I get the whole select how to start windows, and nothing happens so im thinking bad Stick am I right?

[MrDooo]

Could be. If that's the case maybe it wasn't your sister's HDD that took the crap? Could also be non-compatible memory. Try it with ONLY that memory stick and see if it boots.

[Novall]

OK, here are a simple list of questions I need you to answer for me.

1. Have you loaded up Windows to the formatted Hard disk?

2. Have you set your BIOS to boot off the hard drive or the CD?

3. How old is this system?

[Novall]

Also...

Is the memory all the same MHZ? If your sister had DDR 333 and your trying to stick it on a mobo thats using DDR 400, thats not going to work.

Usually when a computer askes how you want it to boot up then its either got some bad BIOS settings or the HDD isnt communicating properly. Bad RAM usually just causes your computer to reboot over and over or get BSOD's.

[KirtViza]

Well the system aint that old, and I think her Memory was not right for my system ahh well, as for how its booting my sis was booting from CD. I riped out the HDD cause it wouldnt boot at all so I hooked it up to mine and Formatted it, replaced it in her case and it booted up, but then said she was missing a NTLDR file.

[Novall]

Well the system aint that old, and I think her Memory was not right for my system ahh well, as for how its booting my sis was booting from CD. I riped out the HDD cause it wouldnt boot at all so I hooked it up to mine and Formatted it, replaced it in her case and it booted up, but then said she was missing a NTLDR file.

Make sure the settings on the back of the CD ROM devise isset properly. An NTLDR error means any of the following things:

1. Computer is booting from a non-bootable source.
2. Computer hard disk drive is not properly setup in BIOS.
3. Corrupt NTLDR and/or NTDETECT.COM file.
4. Misconfiguration with the boot.ini file.
5. Attempting to upgrade from a Windows 95, 98, or ME computer that is using FAT32.
6. New hard disk drive being added.
7. Corrupt boot sector / master boot record.
8. Seriously corrupted version of Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
9. Loose or Faulty IDE/EIDE hard disk drive cable.