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John_1

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Boot Message: Remove disks or other media.

As boot-up begins a black screen with the message "Remove disks or other media. Press any key to restart." comes up.  There are no disks other than the hard drive present. No floppy drive is installed.  Floppy controller is turned off in the BIOS.  No CD's are in the CDROM drives.  Upon pressing "any key" the system finishes booting.  Why does the message occur, on every boot?  How do I fix it???
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Brian Pierce
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rnzb

remove any  usb memory attached
Do you have any boot loaders installed?  You may even have some extra lines in your boot.ini file.
also try disconnecting the printer if it is usb and try it
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ASKER

No floppy in boot order. Set to boot to hard drive first. No usb memory & no printer attached.  Following is the BOOT.INI:
[boot loader]
timeout=0
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Window XP Media Center  Edition"/noexecute=optin/fastdetect
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console"/cmdcons
NOTE: Lines 5 & 6 are actually one line.
make a backup copy of your boot.ini and then remove this line

C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console"/cmdcons

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Removed: C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console"/cmdcons from the BOOT.INI.  Ran a check on the boot paths. This one was was reported as not refering to a valid operating system.  I removed it and rebooted. The same message, "Remove disks or other media. Press any key to restart.", still comes up until I press any key to reboot.
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Finally! The HP computer with a Phoenix Bios has a Boot Device Priority section. 1st Boot Device options are HDD Group, CD-ROM Group, Floppy Group, etc.  1st Boot Device was set to the HDD Group.  Upon further inspection, the lower half of the Boot Device Priority screen lists the Floppy Group Boot Priority, CD-ROM Group Boot Priority, HDD Group Boot Priority, & Network Group Boot Priority.  You press Enter on each Group and set the Boot Device Priority within that group.  The HDD Group Boot Priority was set to boot to the IDE slave drive, first.  Upon changing the Boot Priority to Master, first, the "Remove disks or other media" message no longer appears.  So, the short of it is, in the BIOS, set the Group Boot Order, then set the Boot Order within the Group to boot to the Master drive, first.

Thanks for your time and input, guys!
then i pointed you the right way
as did I :-)
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ASKER

Sorry, nobus & KCTS.  I tried to reassign 250 points to each of you.  Hope it worked.  If not, please advise me.  THANKS!
seems ok now !