Problem with boot

[ICit2lol]

Have an old education department machine I was given and I have put Vista on the hard drive via another machine which is far too slow.

I was using this machine up to two months ago with an XP OS but with the Vista it continually boots goes to Start normally / safe mode etc etc and loads the drivers for safe mod then reboots back to the DOS prompt. If left alone it carries on in what seems to be a boot loop for want of a better term.

The machine is an IBM M51 ThinkCentre with a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 I have 1GB PC 3200 in to try but have more an 80GB HDD SATA with the Vista on it.

I have tried booting from the optical drive with Vista disk (not an OEM) but same story.

There is obviously something going o in the BIOS and I don't know quite where to start fixing tis machine. I would like to because the machine I originally set up for this friends daughter was an IDE one and excruciatingly slow

 

[usasma]

Start with the bootable hardware diagnostics: Initial Hardware Diagnostics
If they pass, then we start looking at bootup stuff.
If you can't boot from the CD/DVD drive, post back for other suggestions.

 

[ICit2lol]

Start with the bootable hardware diagnostics: Initial Hardware Diagnostics
If they pass, then we start looking at bootup stuff.
If you can't boot from the CD/DVD drive, post back for other suggestions.

Thanks John I wished I'd known about a couple of hours ago as I think I have cracked it - the BIOS set up by the department was "excluding" the HDD as boot device and I could not for the life of me think why.

So I took a punt as the machine is "collateral" and got the HDD listed back in the boot menu by adding it in with the "x" instead of the "/" that it was telling me was the symbol to add the drive to the list and it worked. It still isn't booting as I would like but at least have Vista up and running.

I shall use those tools tomorrow getting pretty late and had enough for one day, but I really appreciate your time and advice:D

John