[Kudzupatch]

I bought three gx260's surplus with no drives or power supplies in them. Bought aftermarket Power supply. Pulled a working HD from a computer here at the house. Formatted it and installed w2k no problem. (Per the tag, these were W2K machines BTW). Now when I go to restart I get no OS found error message. I have tried it on all three machines, including reformatting and reinstalling and same results. Obviously what ever is wrong is wrong in all three.

I did notice the one I am messing with now sometimes shows a keyboard error when booting I have checked the obvious stuff like boot order and no luck. No extra cards in them. I have swapped around RAM sticks from machine to machine. I am out of options but sort of leaning toward a bad MB but I am not convinced.

Looking for my next step.

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have you tried removing any existing partitions and repartitioning and reformatting the hard drive? You could also try clearing the bios and resetting to defaults.... By the way are these the towers or the little low-profile versions?

[shard92]

have you tried removing any existing partitions and repartitioning and reformatting the hard drive? You could also try clearing the bios and resetting to defaults.... By the way are these the towers or the little low-profile versions?

[Kudzupatch]

have you tried removing any existing partitions and repartitioning and reformatting the hard drive?

Yup. This one was not partitioned. It was just a backup disk in another computer. I try the others just because nothing else has worked.

Towers.

[shard92]

I'm not sure I'm understanding.... if it was a backup as in backing up files then it had a partition on it..... So they are towers, are the power supplies proprietary? IF not maybe try a different power supply.... You could also run the tester for the hard drive in question ( you can obtain that from the manufacturer of the drive ).

[Kudzupatch]

I may have just found my problem thanks to something you said.

But here is what your missing. I set up my computer with two hard drives. I partition my main drive into C: D: and E: ALL my data goes on D & E. If I have to reformat my data is not lost. Saved my butt a couple of times too.

With the cheap price of drives and backup software I also set up a second slave hard drive in each computer that I back up all the data files from the primary drive to the secondary in case of a drive failure.

So I pulled a drive I was using as a slave/backup drive in my secondary computer. It was redundant (but that is not always a bad thing) and I knew it worked. So does that make sense now?

I just put that drive in my desktop to check it and found some problems. It WAS partitioned and I didn't think it was. My computer could not read two of the partitions either. So I just put it back in the Dell, used MaxBlast to remove the partitions. (Partition Magic couldn't read the disk for some reason) So W2K is reinstalling and formatting the drive as I type this. Hopefully that was somehow the problem.

I really hope I can get two of those computers running to replace what I am running now!

[Kudzupatch]

DANG! After fooling with this thing off and on for weeks now I discover that problem was in the drive. Makes your feel so stoopid!

Thanks for that. I was overlooking the obvious.

Removing the partions did it. Yes it working now. One down and two more (comptuers) to go.

Edited by Kudzupatch, 05 November 2008 - 05:52 PM.

[shard92]

No problem. glad you got it sorted. remember if a drive contains information it has a partition of some kind.... if you use a certain software ( other than windows) to partition something it may not always be seen by other software....

good luck with getting things all set and going with the rest...

[Kudzupatch]

I had it running most of the night and day. Loaded some software and all appears to be good.

I would have sworn that drive was not partitioned so I never checked it. But thats when you get in trouble. Not checking the obvious things that your sure of.