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**PowerHungry** · 11 January 2002, 09:40

Just for the heck of it, try unplugging everything, including your cards, except your floppy drive and try to boot off a boot disk. If that doesnt work, then the problem has been narrowed down a lot. If it does work, then something you removed was at fault. In this case, keep adding in cards until it stops booting, or until there is nothing left to add in.

**KeiFront** · 11 January 2002, 10:03

Spoogenet try clearing your CMOS.

**spoogenet** · 11 January 2002, 11:09

First I think I will start with just the floppy idea, maybe that will bear fruit.

KF: When you say "clear the CMOS"....you mean like unplug the system and pop out the backup battery? I'm not sure if there is a dump jumper on the board.

A couple of years ago a roommate of mine unplugged his PS/2 keyboard while the system was on and it locked the system, then he couldn't boot it up and declared a loss.....but a couple of weeks later he tried it again and it magically worked.....maybe that'll happen to me?

b

**The PIT** · 11 January 2002, 12:42

Clearing your bios isn't a silly idea.
What happens if you boot off your old hard drive?

**Wombat** · 11 January 2002, 13:09

Do you have the new HD detected correctly? Do you have it jumpered correctly? Does it spin up and sound like it's getting power?

A misconfigured/unpowered IDE drive will stop a system dead in its tracks.

**KeiFront** · 11 January 2002, 13:28

Spoogenet on every mobo there is a jumper called clear cmos (just consult your mobo manual). It simply clears the CMOS (settings stored which the BIOS will use) and loads default setting into it. Afterwards you just have to reconfigure your BIOS settings. Clearing your CMOS can cure many problems.

Checking your HD like Wombat says could also resolve your problem.

**spoogenet** · 11 January 2002, 14:44

I guess there is the possibility that when I jostled the system it caused a loose connection with the HD.

The drive is jumpered correctly, I checked and rechecked that before installing it (unless the jumper fell off somehow). The system detected the new HD the first time, booted fine into W2k, I could access the drive just fine....it was when I was moving the case back and then putting on the case cover that it locked up. That's why I mentioned maybe hitting the PS/2 connections.

I did not check if the IDE HD would auto detect after it froze on me, that's something I should have checked. When I was putting the side cover back on I did jar the system a little, so any loose connection could have gotten worse.

PIT: The old HD was not bootable, it was just a data drive with no booting OS on it. Assuming the IDE and HD are not the issue then it wouldn't matter because I can't even boot from floppy.

When I get home I will first try disconnecting/reconnecting things. I will also try booting with no mouse. I didn't feel much like troubleshooting last night, needed my sleep for work today. Thanks for the ideas, I have a good place to start my troubleshooting this weekend.

b

**Wombat** · 11 January 2002, 16:34

When I was putting the side cover back on I did jar the system a little,

Yeah, I've been there. Translation: <I>Get back on there you @$#$# piece of @@#! Ow! (cut finger) (kick) Ha! (kick kick kick) Now I beat you!</I>

After that, I didn't skimp on cases.

**Technoid** · 12 January 2002, 13:02

Blodthirsty Compaqs....

I always have problems with Compaq cases!!

They always tries to bite me!

And more than once the have drawn blood!!

**spoogenet** · 20 January 2002, 16:18

Ok, so here's the deal:

I removed a couple non-essential cards out of the system, left in the Matrox and the SCSI card, disconnected power from IDE hard drive and IDE cable from motherboard, set motherboard to NONE for IDE drive, disconnected mouse, and voila, she booted.

So, put everything back in/reconnected things, set auto-detected IDE drive in BIOS, voila...she didn't boot. Grrrrr.

So, went back into BIOS and ONLY set the IDE drive to NONE and...voila, here I am posting this message.

But the plot thickens....Win2k still recognizes the drive as existing.....strange.

So anyways, the jumper on the IDE drive is set to Master (Single Drive) I believe, it is the ONLY IDE drive in the system. The drive is a 6GB Seagate Medalist Pro something or other, was given to me by a friend, has been used with Win2k before as a ghost drive.

Is there anything I can do to get things to properly be recognized in the BIOS and still boot? I just don't see why it's failing.....

b

**Wombat** · 20 January 2002, 19:05

Something somewhere is feeding your motherboard the wrong information. One thing I hate about IDE is that it isn't very tolerant of faults/misconfigurations. One bad device can bring down the entire system.

Also, if a drive is partitioned and formatted using one geometry, but then you try to use it in another geometry setting (e.g. LBA vs. non-LBA), it can cause faulty drive detection/behavior. Try different geometry settings for that drive; there should be a set printed on the drive itself. If not, you'll have to find the manual.

Maybe the controller itself went bad. Try the drive in another computer if you can. If not, try moving it to the secondary IDE channel, and see if it fares any better.

Or, if you're positive it will boot fine without the IDE controller, you could try to reflash the BIOS of the MB. Maybe some microcode got corrupted. I don't think this is highly likely though. This step I would reserve as last-ditch.

**spoogenet** · 20 January 2002, 19:54

It boots fine with no IDE drives configured in the BIOS....that's how I'm able to post right now. The drive is still connected and powered, Win2k sees the drive, but cannot access either partition. It complains that the primary partition is not formatted and the second partition is corrupted.

This is a replacement drive for my old IDE drive, given to me by a friend who used it as a ghost backup drive in his Win2k rig. He usually didn't use it, he'd just ghost, and then unplug the drive.

When I first put the drive in, everything booted fine, I could access both partitions in Win2k and I renamed the partitions. Then I was poking around putting the case back on, hardware lock, issues.

Since Win2k thinks it can see the drive, maybe I should try formatting the primary partition?

The drive autodetects to LBA, which is what I would expect, I have not tried Normal or Large modes, although I think Normal mode should be avoided, equally Large mode isn't preferable. I'll try it out and see.

I haven't tried it on the secondary controller. Are there any issues with running the only IDE drive from the secondary controller?

b

**cbman** · 20 January 2002, 20:16

Nope... no issues running the only IDE device from the secondary controller.

**spoogenet** · 20 January 2002, 20:31

And the saga continues....

I try to format the drive (while it is still set to None in the BIOS)...formatting gets to 100% then returns with a failure to complete.

I delete the two partitions, that seems to work fine. I removed an extra line from my boot.ini file that pointed to an old copy of Win2k that was on the IDE drive I removed. I rebooted, auto-detected the drive in the BIOS, and voila, it boots fine. I'm not sure whether it was because I deleted the partitions or if maybe it was the extra line in the boot.ini file (why didn't I remove this line earlier? The world may never know).

I am now trying to partition the drive, but to no avail. I am trying to create a 1.5 GB partition, then plan on leaving the rest for another partition. Win2k will not partition the drive.

First I try to partition it and format it NTFS in one step, after getting to 100% it claimed the format failed. So instead I try to just partition it without formatting, it creates one big partition that consumes the drive.

What next? Should I still try switching the drive to Large mode?

b

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Help! System will not boot

Help! System will not boot

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