[Darlena]

Good Morning all,

Bought a new mb to repair my daughters computer. I am using her old hard drive. But I am have problems getting it going. When I boot up the mb doesn't see the hard drive. I can see it in the Bios settings. But the keyboard stops responding (Like it's not even connected) after about 30 seconds. Messages- Primary master hard disk fail, disk boot fail,insert system disk and press enter. I'm lost needless to say. The mb is an ECS KM400-M2 with Duron 188 processor. Any advise would be very much appreciated.

Darlena

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Hi Darlena. You need to access the bios and change the boot order to boot from cd first, then make sure your windows install cd is in your cd drive. Then restart the system. You should then be able to boot from your windows cd and proceed with install to the hard drive.

[austin_o]

Hi Darlena. You need to access the bios and change the boot order to boot from cd first, then make sure your windows install cd is in your cd drive. Then restart the system. You should then be able to boot from your windows cd and proceed with install to the hard drive.

[Darlena]

Thanks, but I am using a hd that already has os xp installed, trying to save it. Is that possible, or a no go? can I boot from the xp cd and do a reinstall to keep my stuff or not?

darlena

[austin_o]

You can try doing a repair. See the guide at http://www.geekstogo...ws_XP-t138.html

[Armic]

Not sure about G2G rules on this, but if it was a defective mobo then no prob.
Do what austin_0 says. Boot from xp cd, choose to install xp at the first option, (not recovery console etc) then repair instalation at the second, then just follow the prompts. This will reinstall xp, Leaving your current settings intact. You will need your xp serial no. & will need to reactivete xp.

[Darlena]

Hi again,

Armic,

I have seen/read what your refering too and that is what I want to do. New problem though. i reset the CMOS and now the mb detected the hd as primary drive. But I can't get the cd-rom to work. I know it has power but it's not loading the xp cd at all, no response. I don't rember seening it in the bios settings, should it show up there?
Any idea? Anyone, I know its something stupid that I've overlooked. Thanks again.

PS. I'm beginning to wonder if I have a power problem, I tried to boot from the windows cd again and I got that blue line that runs across the bottom of the screen and then nothing. It's like it's trying to load but can't. I have replaced the hd from a 30 to 80 gig and added the newer mb and processor, but forgot to add a bigger power supply. It's got a 180 watt power suppy, and a have a 400 watt ordered (as an after thought)but won't get it till Tuesday. I'm hoping that it but I'll let you know. I guess I'm learning the hard way about hardware huh!!!

Edited by Darlena, 18 November 2006 - 05:39 PM.

[Armic]

I take it that you will now be doing a new install of windows?

[Darlena]

HELLO,

no, I don't want to do a new install of windows, i want to do a repair installation. But with a new mb and the old hd. Something is messed up though because I can find the hd in the bios only if i don't have the ide cable plugged into the cd-rom. if I connect the ide cable to the cd-rom nothing works at all. How do I get the cd-rom and the hd both to show up in the bios when there is some sort of conflict between them and/or the mb.

Any advise? Thanks

Darlena

[Armic]

There are 'jumpers, on the back of these drives. A jumper is a small piece of plastic with a metal insert, which is used to bridge the gap between 2 pins.
On each of the drives, if you look at the printed info on the top, it normally tells you which pins to bridge to set the drive to master/slave/cable select (cs). If it is not printed here, it will be printed near the pins.

You cannot have 2 masters or 2 slaves, or just 1 drive set as cs on one cable, I think this is where your problem lies.

Ideally if these are the only 2 drives in the pc, they would both have their own cable & the jumpers on both set to 'master'.(dont worry about this though). But as you are only using 1 cable, ideally, you should set the hard drive as master & the cd-rom as slave. Alternatively they can both be set to cs.

Armic

[ultimateslacker2]

make sure you connected the drive correctly. If not inserted correctly, you will receive a error message

[Darlena]

Hello again,

Still having problems. I HAVE THE PINS CORRECTLY SET FOR HD AS MASTER AND CD-ROM AS Slave. ide cable first from mb to hd then to cd-rom. Os will not boot up at all like this . If i disconnent the ide cable from the cd-rom the os will boot up fine. I can then reconnect the ide cable to the cd rom and restart (not reboot) and the os sees both the hd and cr-rom. But when I shut down again it will not reboot. Could the ide cable itself be bad? Or maybe the cr-rom(it is old, yet it seems to wrok fine.) What about BIOS setting, have i done something wrong there, or need to update?

Thanks,

darlena

[Armic]

No, you dont need a bios update.

Your pc may be a bit fussy about the ide cable configuration, a lot of motherboards will only see the drives correctly if the 'master' is at the end of the cable & the slave in the middle. If your cable is not long enough to do this & you havent got another cable, try setting the cd rom as master & the hard drive as slave.

Armic

[Darlena]

Bless you Armic. You've saved my sanity. This has been driving me nuts, I'm one of those that cannot give up and has to fix any and every computer my family and friends ask me to work on.

I tried switching the order of the cables before and it did'nt work then or now until I changed the boot order to cd-rom first, like you suggested. And now everything boots up perfect. i had to do it several times just to prove to myself i wasn't dreaming!

And as an added bonus!! for some reason the os wouldn't go into standby (it was actually greyed out), another problem i hadn't even started to work on. Apparantly that also was related to the cable glich, so now it works! Imagine that!!

Can't thank you enough,

Darlena

[Tyger]

If I can chip in here, Windows XP won't be able to recognize the new hardware in a different motherboad, you may be able to get away with a repair but a new install is your most likely bet. If you replaced it with another board with the same chipset you might be able to get away with it, but you would have to install a lot of drivers.

[Darlena]

My main objective was to save all the info on the os, which I did, and I didn't have to install any extra drivers as it found them all by itself. My mistake was with the ide cable and boot up sequence. I did have to reinstall all the windows updates, but that wasn't real a big deal, as I had a ms update disc which covered all updates up to Oct.04'.

Guess I was just lucky, huh! But as long as it worked, what the hey!