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I recently finished my build and when I powered it up I get this on my screen...

"Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key"


This is my first build and I'm not exactly sure what is meant by the boot media, I thought the screen would show the mobo info and then mention something about installing the OS but I'm in uncharted waters and I'm not sure what to expect.

The mobo gets power and the fans spin but I'm not hearing a beep so I'm not even sure if it's posting. I have no idea what I did wrong but I guess I missed something.

any ideas ?

Well apparently the "boot media" is the equivalent to "operating system". All I did was insert the OS in my cd drive and everything is peachy keen.

I called my brother(he works in IT) and explained to me that "boot media" is really the OS and that's what it was asking for in my case.

So what I did wrong was to not insert the OS.

I was thrown off by the term "boot media"... silly me, thinking I could understand nerd language and finish the build by myself.

tukkus wrote:

I thought the screen would show the mobo info

It will if you enter the BIOS. To do this you typically press delete whilst it's booting up.
If you're not prepared to read about how your should edit the BIOS settings though, you're probably best just leaving it alone. If it ain't broke, don't fix it

What I meant to say about the mobo info was the splash screen from the mobo.

tukkus wrote:

What I meant to say about the mobo info was the splash screen from the mobo.

Almost all motherboards these days hide the CPU/disks/RAM information at bootup behind a brand logo screen instead
They usually have the option to hide the splash screen (the tab key does this for a lot of brands) and then it will show you BIOS information and CPU/drive/RAM detection instead. The splash screen can normally be turned off altogether in the BIOS settings too.

If you continue to have problems even after you've installed the operating system make sure that you have the hard drive with the OS set as the first hard drive in the boot order list.

Some people like to have the boot order be 1) USB 2) DVD 3) Hard Disk, but if you have this order then if you have a Flash Drive plugged in or a DVD in the tray at boot then the computer will try to boot from these first. It will be unsuccessful if the Flash Drive or DVD is not bootable (which is normally the case unless its a OS install, recovery disk, or Linux Live CD).