Calling computer experts

Factual Questions
1

I have a computer that’s annoying the hell out of me.

It refuses to boot from either of the hard drives.

It’s an old celeron 500 mhz machine, that at the moment has 128 megs of ram and the motherboard is an Advance 5/133E. I didn’t purchase or build this system… it just showed up one day and I was asked to try and fix it.

The problem is really weird. The computer will boot from a floppy, it’ll boot from a CD, but when I turn the boot order to “C only” it stalls at verifying DMI pool data and just hangs there. I’ve tried formatting the hard drives many times, I’ve tried switching around the IDE cables, I’ve tried all the possible jumper combinations, I’ve unplugged everything BUT the hard drive, 1 stick of RAM and the video card, I’ve flashed the BIOS… but it still won’t boot from the hard drive.

There are two hard drives: a seagate 30 gb hard drive and an old 4 gb hard drive that’s broken. When the computer first showed up, it was able to boot from the smaller hard drive. After I removed the operating system and tried to boot it up once, it gave me the message “Betriebsystem nicht gefunden” or, in English, “operating system not found” when I tried to make it boot from the hard drive. After this I screwed around with a lot of stuff, and I haven’t seen the “betriebsystem nicht gefunden” message again.

Anyone have any idea what I could have possibly messed up? Does this sound like a problem with the motherboard, IDE cables, or what? If it’s the motherboard that’s messing it up and there’s no good way to fix it, could someone recommend a motherboard I could buy to replaces it?

Thanks

2

I had this after a hard drive cable came loose and screwed up the data - I ended up having to use the Western Digital diagnostics disc, and writing zeros to the whole drive, before the Windows setup would even recognise the hard drive’s presence

3

Have you tried swapping in another hard drive and booting from it? Further, have you tried replacing the IDE cable entirely? If one of those 40 (or 80) wires is damaged…

At the very least, it’ll let you know if the problem lies on the motherboard or not. Replacement recommendations depend entirely on what you plan to do with this machine and how much you plan to spend.

4

GorillaMan: The BIOS can recognize the harddrive when I do the automatic IDE hard drive detection thing in the BIOS, it’s just when I try to boot from it that the trouble starts.

** Bryan Ekers **: I have tried using the IDE cable that I’d been using for the CD-ROM and CD-RW drives, but it didn’t make any difference.

If I were to need to buy anything, I’d want it to be as inexpensive as possible. This is a computer for my host parents, and they really don’t need anything super fast. If I can’t make any progress at all with this computer, I’ll probably just build them an athlon xp 2500+ 512 mb ram type of thing, but that’s only a last resort.

It’s just so weird that the bios sees the hard drive and recognizes it, but won’t try to boot from it. Argh!

5

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I don’t have any other hard drive that I could swap in to test.

6

Try changing your memory stick.

I’ve just got back on the boards again after huge amounts of problems.

One of these was that one memory stick was dodgy, it would install the operating system, but as it did so, it got currupted by the memory.

Actually in my case it was 3 duff memory sticks and a duff motherboard, I replaced each, one by one and every bit was faulty.

Once I had swapped the motherboard and was left with the suspect memory I got the symptoms you describe.

7

Did you just re-format? If so, you should also run FDISK and FDISK /MBR to wipe the partitions and master boot record.

8

Try iot with just one hdd in there.

I suspect you may have your MAster/Slave settings incorrect.
If you have both on the same IDE cable you should chose either cable select or set one to master and one to slave.

How ?
Look at the label on the drive , it will tell you whihc jumper setttings to choose.

9

That’s what happened to me…the BIOS recognised it fine, but Windows Setup would reach the partitioning stage, and announce that no drive could be found. And the same with the recovery console.

10

when I run windows setup it can and has formatted the hard drive (I’ve been trying to run it with windows NT). It’s after it tells me to remove all CDs/disks and reboot that I get the trouble.

And I’m pretty sure it’s not the jumper settings, as I’ve tried all this with about every combination possible. Most of the time I am only using one hard drive, and it’s alone on the IDE cable.

Right now I’m going to go try the other stick of RAM, do the fdisk/fdisk /MBR thing and see where that gets me.

Thanks for all the replies so far!

11

Double check the master/slave jumpers. If they are screwed, you can get this.

Install one drive, and jumper it as master.

If that works, jumper it as “master with slave” then jumper the second as slave and install it.

Both should (with luck) work then.

If these jumpers are set wrong, the bios can see the drives, but you probably can’t boot - which is the problem you have.

12

One other thing you probably did, but I just want to make sure. You are formatting the drive with the /s switch, right? To copy system files to it. Otherwise, it’s a non bootable disk. Assuming you did that: Can you see the hard drive (and write files to it) when you boot from a CD or a floppy?

Jman

13

Wow…it’s finally over. I finally defeated that pos computer.

But the thing that’ll bug me is that I’m not really sure what did it. I did too many things at the same time. I swapped the RAM sticks which didn’t work all by itself, but after I formatted the hard drive for the billionth time, it finally recognized it on the boot.

I probably just forgot to give the hard drive a good format after I flashed the BIOS… I think. Right now the computer is up and running windows XP pro without any trouble. I put the other stick of RAM back in before installing, and I didn’t have any trouble, so hopefully that wasn’t it.

And by the way, I was formatting with /s before, and the jumpers were fine.

Thanks for your advice and posts everybody. I really, really like this messageboard :smiley: