Cannot Boot Up, Not detecting Hard Drive, CMOS Issues

dwitydwity
edited July 2004 in Hardware
:banghead: :banghead: :banghead: I have an old PIII 550 machine on a biostar M6TBA motherboard that I disassembled, cleaned and reassembled. The only thing I changed is threw away the CD drive which was bad. Now the system is not recognizing the hard drive and tells me disk boot failure. I did unplug and remove the hard drive but I didn't think that would cause the os or boot sequence to be lost. Computer is running 98SE, which I don't have discs for anymore. I planned on putting xp pro on the machine to see if it helps reliability but without a CD I cannot use the disk as boot or install. I'm thinking just get a new CD drive and play with installing the new OS. Any suggestions or things I'm missing that are obvious? I've downloaded manual for mobo and all jumpers are correct and I've reset CMOS. Thanks gang, I've learned a ton reading all of your posts.

Mike

Comments

  • yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
    edited July 2004
    are the drives succeeding a barrier, such as the 32gb limit?

    ...I've had trouble with P3 systems too lately, I just say screw it. But thats just me.
  • dwitydwity
    edited July 2004
    No, Its the same 4g hd that I had in there prior. I did change the zip drive to a master since the cd drive is gone. It was a slave when the cd was in. How do I check to see if the hd is working? fans spin, lights go but I cannot confirm hd is spinning...

    thanks,
    MIke :banghead:
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited July 2004
    Ok, I bet that the CDROM was set as master, and the HDD to slave. When you took the CDROM out, it's trying to boot from a master drive that doesn't exist any more.

    You'll have to set the jumper on the back of the HDD to the master position, and that should be printed somewhere on the top of your drive, moulded into the plastic near the jumper grid, or silkscreened onto the drive's PCB.
  • XyphusXyphus South Bend, Indiana
    edited July 2004
    Also, from past experience, internal ZIP drives, even though you can set to master, they really want to be set as a slave. I've had nothing but troubles if set otherwise.

    Also, some older WD drives I've used, if not on a channel with another device, they do not like to be set to Master, but rather as SINGLE. If set to master, a lot of times they would not even show up in BIOS. But if set to SINGLE (usually either removing the jumper completely, or putting it into the "single" mode which usually just is a storage pin to keep the jumper from being lost.) then they fire right up and seem to be happy.
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