won't boot without CD

scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
edited December 2003 in Hardware
Well ...I came down this morning to see what is going on here and check my folding progress....Imagine my suprise when I see my monitor with a cursor flashing in the upper left hand corner. I guess it restarted for some unknown reason last night and never made it to the logon screen. I rebooted and it showed the first bios screen all looked normal then it went to the Raid bios screen..Red every where.So I hit control -I to get into the raid bios and the opening screen said that there was a repairable error. To repair hit "Y" I did. it said "repaired" and all the red Error flags turned to green "Normal" I let it restart the boot process. It went through the normal bios and raid screens and then hangs at the flashing cursor just before it would load the OS. So I put the XP cd in the tray and changed boot priority to that drive. I did NOT "hit any key to boot from CD" and just let it go and it booted into windows just fine. I have checked system logs to try and figure out what happened but I am not sure. All I know is it happened last night about 3am. I have tried a system restore to a couple of days ago but it will still not boot with out the cd in the tray. I looked in msconfig at the boot ini files but do not know what i am looking at, here is a screen shot. Any Ideas ?

Ps I got my first red cog last night ! :fold:

Comments

  • scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Not really sure what I did but after a couple of reboots into F8 and last know good config...It seems to be starting ok without the cd. I wonder what happened last night? I am on a UPS so i know it was not a power outage. My full load temps are 42c so I doubt it was a temp issue. MBM high and low screen shows voltages all normal. NAV did its weekly virus scan last night around 7 no infections. I wonder what happened !
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Well, a couple ideas:

    since it is hanging at a cursor, and you can get into windows with a CD boot, my question becomes this:

    Does unplugging the CD-ROM from the IDE cable let you boot from HD??? (Probably not, see below, but if it DOES, then problem is in CD player old IDE cable used by CD player and BIOSs can hang at boot with a cursor when a bad cable is in use or device is hung also.)

    If so, concentrate on CD device, it might have a bad cable, OR (equally to more likely) the BIOSs reference table might hav gotten corrupted when the CMOS battery got very low in juice and the boot from RAID might have gotten wiped (IF a BIOS defaults, it will try to boot from IDE and not RAID, and RAID will get ignored so the BOOT SECTOR on your RAID HD never gets found, and if you have Windows system files on a RAID device but a boot sector on a IDE device, it will hang as the redirect in the boot sector to a RAID device never gets a found on RAID result).

    Logial most first thing is CMOS battery, the RAID hooks in CMOS table that let RAID be found will be wiped if the CMOS battery is real low, and box will sit there with a flashing cursor for along time if RAID BIOS subtable in CMOS gets wiped also. ALL rED, says BIOS has a bad refernce table to devices it controls, and with embedded RAID, this subtable is on main CMOS CHIP. time on computer gradually going awry desptie repeated resetting of time, especially but not only after a reboot, says that cMOS battery is getting low on juice, as BOTH the CMOS and the CLOCK in computer are maintained by that little bettery and when it runs low random things and time start going out of reality as to values stored, and clock ticks first too fast and then suddenly very slow, then each cold boot results in time being date clock was mfr'd or aBIOS fallback default date and time as BIOS can reset a bad or scrambled clock time in CMOS to a default and this is a very good sign that new battery is needed and batteries are hyper-cheap. I write install dates on batteries with an extra-fine sharpie, where the electrical contacts do not touch, and average 2-3 years between battery changeouts if if I start with a box where the mobo CMOS cell gets replaced first thing when building a box.

    John.
  • NecropolisNecropolis Hawarden, Wales Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Please see above link. Closing thread.
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