[Dezi100]

Originaly this computer had a IDE CD/DVD and HDD on one cable plugged into the IDE channel on the motherboard.
The SATA ports were not used at all...it ran fine utill I was asked to format it and reload win7 as it was going to be given to some one else, the whole operation was just to remove all personel data of the owner.

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What I'm asking is if you now have a SATA drive connected to a SATA controller and the installation worked and the system now boots up correctly with the SATA drive as the boot drive.
If so your IDE 1 may be faulty and that is why it won't boot from it.

[rshaffer61]

What I'm asking is if you now have a SATA drive connected to a SATA controller and the installation worked and the system now boots up correctly with the SATA drive as the boot drive.
If so your IDE 1 may be faulty and that is why it won't boot from it.

[Dezi100]

Yes.. I now have a SATA drive connected to one of the SATA sockets on the motherboard, and an IDE CD drive conected to the IDE socket on the mother board.
when it boots up it goes through the flash screen, which has the information on it to access the BIOS, then when "Starting Windows" should appear it goes black and the curser flashes in the top left corner of the monitor.

[rshaffer61]

OK I think you need to go into the bios and set the SATA drive as the boot device now.

[Dezi100]

I did that when I fitted the SATA drive

[rshaffer61]

Still no boot into windows. OK this is strange since it doesn't have the IDE hard drive now and the SATA drive is the boot device it is either the hard drive which I doubt since the installation went without a problem.
The other option is the SATA is not configured correctly to be the first boot.
The system is not identifying the drive in the correct SATA slot.
A faulty installation
The motherboard has a serious controller problem.

[Dezi100]

I also think its a problem with the motherboard's BIOS, but other than the boot order I dont see any other mention in the BIOS about any boot management. As I can tell the computer to boot from the SATA HDD via another program and it dose perfectly, ths would suggest that the BIOS software is wrong ??

[rshaffer61]

You can try to set the bios to default settings and see if that works. It may be a setting you can do within bios and if not you remove the cmos battery for a couple of minutes and then put it back in. Bootup and the bios should be default.

[Dezi100]

Tried the default settings, but no change.
Even when the first boot device is set as the SATA HDD it still hangs up with the curser flashing. On my own computer this happens the same for a very short time then windows starts up. It seems to me like there's a comand missing in the process somewhere to tell the computer to go to the HDD...

[rshaffer61]

Actually with the black screen with the flashing cursor it is most likely the OS that is the problem.
Is the OS installation disk a original Microsoft Win7 installation disk, download copy even if from a Microsoft authorized site or a burned copy?

[Dezi100]

The OS disk is an original Microsoft Win7 installation disk,

[rshaffer61]

Lets try a experiment.
Can you boot into Safe Mode and that will show if there is a particular driver that is causing this.

Also I would like you to do the following.


If you have more than one RAM module installed, try starting computer with one RAM stick at a time.

NOTE Keep in mind, the manual check listed above is always superior to the software check, listed below. DO NOT proceed with memtest, if you can go with option A

B. If you have only one RAM stick installed...
...run memtest...


1. Download - Pre-Compiled Bootable ISO (.zip). If you prefer to use the USB version then use this link USB KEY
2. Unzip downloaded /memtest86+-4.20.iso.zip file.
3. Inside, you'll find /memtest86+-4.20.iso file.
4. Download, and install ImgBurn: http://www.imgburn.com/
5. Insert blank CD into your CD drive.
6. Open ImgBurn, and click on Write image file to disc
7. Click on Browse for a file... icon:



8. Locate memtest86+-4.20.iso file, and click Open button.
9. Click on ImgBurn green arrow to start burning bootable memtest86 CD:



10. Once the CD is created, boot from it, and memtest will automatically start to run. You may have to change the boot sequence in your BIOS to make it work right.

To change Boot Sequence in your BIOS

Reboot the system and at the first post screen (where it is counting up memory) start tapping the DEL button
This will enter you into the Bios\Cmos area.
Find the Advanced area and click Enter
Look for Boot Sequence or Boot Options and highlight that click Enter
Now highlight the first drive and follow the directions on the bottom of the screen on how to modify it and change it to CDrom.
Change the second drive to the C or Main Drive
Once that is done then click F10 to Save and Exit
You will prompted to enter Y to verify Save and Exit. Click Y and the system will now reboot with the new settings.


The running program will look something like this depending on the size and number of ram modules installed:




It's recommended to run 5-6 passes. Each pass contains very same 8 tests.

This will show the progress of the test. It can take a while. Be patient, or leave it running overnight.



The following image is the test results area:



The most important item here is the “errors” line. If you see ANY errors, even one, most likely, you have bad RAM.

[Dezi100]

OK I'll give it a go over night... (Thanks for the input so far)

[rshaffer61]

No problem and I will wait for your results.
I'm down to either a motherboard, memory, optical drive reading issue or bios issue.
If this is a store bought OS installation and unless there are some severe scratches on the disk I see no other reason for this.

[Dezi100]

"SORTED" :-)

I was scaning through an old "NT for Dummies" I've never looked at for years..
and I found a section covering reseting the "Master Boot Record"

In case it may help anyone else this is what I did..

Win7 DVD in the DVD drive and boot from the disk, when given the opertunity >choose the repair option >choose the command prompt >type in bootsect /nt60 c:\ (thats if you OS is on the C drive) >type in when the last function completes bootsect /nt60 SYS >type in when the last function completes bootsect /nt60 ALL

Thanks for all you help in this nightmare, You got me thinking earlier when you mentioned that the BIOS didn't seem to see the partition.
I still don't know why this happened and would like to know... I knew there was a reason for keeping all those tattered dog eared books.