Disk boot failure

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Disk boot failure

Well the build is finished and the best part is that the PC Chips board is good and probably the Biostar board I sent back to NewEgg on an RMA.

The problem was the master hard drive's configuration. It's a Western Digital and as most of you probably already know, when setting as a master with no slave you simply pop off the jumper. You leave the jumper if there will be an accompanying slave on that same ribbon cable.

You probably also know that the configuration legend printed on the hard drive is transposed so you must orient your legend to the power plug. Otherwise you'll set up the drive as a slave instead of a master with a slave.

Because of the messed up configuration, my BIOS never recognized the hard drive and it also made the Secondary IDE controller disappear!

I still ended up formatting thru Window's disk management utility and the BIOS seemed to recognize the drive enough to load the OS.

Tomorrow I tackle the mysterious missing LAN. The drivers are loaded in and the Device Manager sees it and indicates it's working normally, but in my network connections, it's not there.

I'm expecting two NIC cards from NewEgg along with two P4 Intel Socket 478 mobo's with Intel chipsets from ComputerGeeks.

It's 2:35am...got the last build boxed up and ready for delivery in the morning...a nice Celeron-D 2.53Ghz running 512mb DDR400 ram. This is the one I salvaged the hard drive, one IDE cable and the DVD-ROM drive from. It was originally a Compaq P3 that failed big time. Turns out the secondary CD-burner fried, the DVD-ROM's IDE cable failed along with the floppy IDE cable, the 128-mb of PC133 ram wouldn't pass the ram check, the power supply was a small 180-watt micro-ATX PSU so that fried when this gal installed her CD-burner. The mobo was a Foxconn board that also was messed up. Basically the computer was a wash. I was hoping I could have used the memory, cables, drives but alas not much to salvage on this project.

Good night all

[lurkah]

Re: Disk boot failure

The problem was the master hard drive's configuration. It's a Western Digital and as most of you probably already know, when setting as a master with no slave you simply pop off the jumper. You leave the jumper if there will be an accompanying slave on that same ribbon cable.

You probably also know that the configuration legend printed on the hard drive is transposed so you must orient your legend to the power plug. Otherwise you'll set up the drive as a slave instead of a master with a slave.

(also check that the Master/Slave/Cable Select jumper settings are correct)

As most of us already know? Nah, there's just too many things, as in this case, fundamental things, that can keep biting you on the okole when you're too close to the problem and you keep banging your head against the wall knowing that the solution is probably right there in front of your nose.

It helps to walk away for a while and do something else in hopes that when you return the logical solution will unveil itself to you like an unwrapped gift.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Disk boot failure

talk about banging heads, I was working on this computer for over 10-hours trying what I thought was everything. Finally at 4am I quit and went to sleep. Waking up at 10am I decided to pull the entire computer apart and rebuild from scratch until I saw the error.

When I reconfigured the hard drive and rebooted the system I was floored when the BIOS recognized both Primary and Secondary IDE's

With the OS disk in the Primary optical drive XP loaded up like a champ.