pc wont boot

tmh88tmh88 Pittsburgh / Athens, OH
edited June 2008 in Hardware
i tried to install vista on my desktop. everything went smoothly, and it restarted. when booting back up it hangs saying "detecting ide drives" and below it, it reads "press del for setup...." but it wont let me press anything . i reset the cmos and still hangs. what should i try doing?

Comments

  • adarryladarryl No Man Stands So Tall As When He Stoops To Help a Child. Icrontian
    edited June 2008
    You had another operating system on this PC before attempting Vista? Did you have any form of overclock going before the Vista install? If so, did you load system defaults in the BIOS before the Vista install? These were a couple of gotchas that got me recently resulting in the same symptoms you are describing.

    Anyway, I would disconnect all drives except for your primary HD with the Vista install, boot and hit DEL to get into the BIOS. If it won't, pull the power and the CMOS battery and clear the BIOS again using the jumper. Return the jumper to default and reinsert your battery. Power up again with ONLY the hard drive with Vista. Once more, hit DEL to try to enter the BIOS to verify HD detection. If it lets you into the BIOS this time, set boot order to your hard drive first , save and exit. If it boots up to desktop, go ahead and reattach your other drives, boot and see if they are detected in the BIOS. If so, reset things to your preferred boot order. GL!
  • tmh88tmh88 Pittsburgh / Athens, OH
    edited June 2008
    I got it working by booting without the IDE devices getting power. It gave me a message about no drives detected, so I restarted. Plugged them back in and it booted fine right into vista.

    btw, no, my cpu was not overclocked. I booted with the vista disc in, went into installation, formatted the HD, installed it, and then when it did all of the install crap and restarted, thats when I got the problem.

    Anyway, its working fine now, so thanks for hte advice anyway.
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