The point of doing the jumper thing or removing the battery is to be sure everything resets – it is possible, particularly since you have had a failed flash, that somewhere in there a bit or two is corrupted that might prevent the Load Optimum Defaults program from being 100% effective.
If using the battery removal method, I would physically disconnect the power cord from the computer to be sure … even with the computer turned off there is still power in the board and it could conceivably keep the CMOS powered.
Since it does seem your computer is a few years old, you might give some serious consideration to heading out to Radio Shack for a new battery before you go through all this so you don’t have to do it all again if the battery does turn out to be a problem.
After you reset the BIOS, make sure the correct HDD is in the boot order. If you’ve got two SATA HDDs then the boot order needs to be the right way round.
Thank you everyone for spending time helping me out with this, I really appreciate it.
I still don’t have it working
I popped the battery and took a shower. Upon startup, I was greeted with a new message: “CMOS checksum error - Defaults loaded”. F1 to continue gets me stuck at the same spot. I then restarted and stopped by the BIOS menu to check things out.
In “Standard CMOS Features”, the IDE Channel 0 Master is still listed as my “TSSTcorpCD/DVDW TS-H”. This is the same as before, and I’m assuming this is incorrect.
In “Advanced BIOS Features”, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Boot Devices are Floppy, Hard Disk, CDROM. Boot Up Floppy Seek is disabled. Init Display First is PEG (as opposed to PCI Slot).
I’m not sure what other settings might be relevant. I can list anything that might be important. I’m wondering if they just plugged in the innards of my computer wrong, and then used weird settings to correct that.
As mentioned previously, I can boot off an Ubuntu CD and access the full hard drive w/o a problem, so it’s not like it got unplugged or something.
Oh and also, in case it’s relevant, the drives installed are 1 hard drive, 1 optical, and 1 floppy.
If I were in your shoes (and I have been). At this point I would pull all drives out (that is, pull the IDE cables off them) and attached ONLY the hard drive that you want to boot from to IDE0 as a master drive. Also, set the jumper to master or CS. Boot the computer, check BIOS to make sure the drive is coming up on the first IDE and as a master drive. Also make sure it is on the boot list (which it should do automatically). Then try booting and see where you get. If that works I would then put the CDRom on either IDE0/Slave or IDE1/Master and set the jumpers accordingly and plug the floppy back in. Check BIOS to make sure they set themselves up correctly and see if you can boot to windows.
Basically, let’s not mess with all the other stuff until we can get the system working, then if it goes to hell as you start adding drives back on, it’ll be easier to troubleshoot.
Yep, what Joey said … get down to the bare minimum.
It’s usually recommended to use the fastest drive (the hard drive) as the master but I have heard it claimed that a CD drive will operate faster if it is set as master … that might be how yours is set up.
Time to check the jumpers on the backs of the drives. If you’re lucky there will be markings by the jumpers saying Master / Slave or MA / SL, if not, you’re going to have to find the manuals for your drives and set them – hard disk as master and cd drive as slave.
You could just unplug the CD drive temporarily to see if it solves your problem but you probably do want to go ahead and change the master / slave settings if they aren’t right. (Actually, I wouldn’t say it’s wrong, just non-standard – but it might be part of the problem.)
That error after removing the battery is exactly what you wanted to happen. You are now definitely using the default settings. To flash from the floppy you have to ENABLE Boot Up Floppy Seek.
I’m at work (again) but I’ll be leaving early today (maybe in ~11 hours) to fiddle with things again.
A question:
Is IDE0 a specific cable? Jumpers I think I can handle.
Maybe they did set the CD as the main drive. Might be easy enough to fix.
I’m not sure how to tell what kind of hard drive I have from looking at it or checking after booting in Linux, but the email from Monarchcomputer 4 years ago says it’s SATA.
If it’s a SATA drive then the identification of the CD is not a problem. You need to make sure that the BIOS is seeing your HDD on one of the SATA connectors. Is it possible you accidentally knocked a cable loose? SATA connectors are very much smaller than IDE ones and, when they were first introduced, came adrift very easily.
Aha. I suspect you have IDE optical and floppy drives and a SATA hard drive. In that case the slave / master thing is not an issue … the CD is the master and the floppy the slave one IDE channel … the SATA drive is a whole different thing. That explains why your CD drive is listed as master.
So, if you do have that set-up (I do) you can forget the slave / master jumper; they are OK.
Time to take a deep breath and do the flashy thing, being sure to ENABLE seeking floppy on boot.
The flashy thing scares me
But I guess I’ll try it again. This time, the regular way.
It’s odd that the BIOS doesn’t see the HDD, but I can still access it from Ubuntu. I’m assuming that means the cables aren’t jogged out, but I’ll poke at them just in case.
Don’t worry … after the flash you won’t remember any of this.
The HDD doesn’t show up on the IDE screen because it’s not IDE. SATA is a whole different thing.
BTW, I’m up on this process because I just went through it over the weekend. I too was booting to Ubuntu to solve my problem. My computer works now, although I did end up having to reinstall Windows because I had also picked up several viruses and trojans poking around in places I shouldn’t have been.
After escaping to a warmer place for a week, I got back into town on Sunday and started looking around online, and my computer works now!
I didn’t do the flashy thing. I’m still on the old BIOS, but it was flashed correctly as far as I can tell. All I had to do was disable “NV IDE/SATA RAID function”* in the “Integrated Peripherals” menu.
Now I’m back to where I started, with two RAM sticks that don’t work
Maybe I’ll still do the flashy thing, but not from Windows. We’ll see. For now, I’m just going to play some very choppy and crashy Fallout.
*My understanding is that the default should be disabled, but they screwed that up. One of the later BIOS updates was actually to fix that.
Can you give me all the information you can from your new RAM sticks?
Old sticks:
PC 3200 - 400 MHz
DDR
New sticks:
??
The numbers should match (but can be higher, the memory will simply underclock itself to work with the old RAM), and the format HAS to be DDR. It won’t fit in otherwise, so I assume you bought the correct type.
The other factor that caught my eye was that you have the XMS series. It’s quite a good set, usually placed in overclockers’ computers, or hardcore gamers. This may indicate that default memory timings are definitely not correct.
The stick itself should have the memory timings on them (say, 3-3-3-3). Armed with that, you’ll have to enter the BIOS and enter those timings into the system.
Last but not least, if all else fails, download the “Ultimate Boot CD” and run Memtest86+ on the memory sticks. If installed correctly, they should give no errors.
P.S. With windows, SATA drives are included in the same list as USB devices (in the plug-and-play menu) because they are designed to be hot swappable. IDE drives are not, and thus don’t have that feature.
