How do you know what's wrong when you have no errors?

[Tithulta]

Ok I've put together and OLD system for my sister to use as an email machine which is all she does with a puter besides surfing a bit. Well like I said it's OLD, but not stone age.
Ok here is the system specs followed by a description of the problem.

P5I430TX Titanium IB+
300 mhz amd k6/2
16 mb pc100 sdram
540 mb quantum hdd(oldest part;compaq oem part;system bought in 95)
250w atx psu
voodoo3 3000 pci
I don't remember what OS either 98 or 95
(audio not installed at this time)

This board actually has a very nice bios lots of tweaking available.

Anyrate my problem is it's not booting, it gives no errors, it gives no POST error beeps. The Hdd shows up in the cmos menu as secondary master. after the ram count it just stops booting, but doesn't freeze up as I can wait a few minutes and hit DEL to enter the bios with no problem or I just hit the DEL key right off and enter the bios. Is it a dead hard drive? I am thinking it is since I don't hear it turning. Also why would the floppy light stay on? It's brand new... it doesn't seem to be doing anything, but the light is on.

Any ideas?

[repo man11]

Generally, the floppy LED stays on when the cable is backwards. (180 off) My old ASUS board doesn't have keyed slots for the cables, so it's easy to put them on wrong.

[Placid]

Yes and if the pc is set up to boot from drive a: first then it's waiting for drive a: to respond.

[Tithulta]

Ok you were right aboutt he floppy...the stupid thing actually has 2 cut out so that it IS possible to install it backwards...go figure.

Futhermore I can't make it boot at all so far. I've changed the boot device to everything listed and tried a start-up disk to no avail.

Bad Hdd? Bad pci bus? I'd liked to ahve gotten to tinker with this board some before giving it to my sister, but looks like might not happen.

[repo man11]

You've set it to boot from drive A, and you use a boot floppy. What happens then? Does it just stop after detecting the drives?

[Ridenow]

Disconnect the hard drive and try to boot. You should get a "hard drive not found" or a "No boot device" error. If you do get one of those messages then you know that is a bad hard drive, bad hard drive controller or bad IDE cable.

If you have a CD-ROM installed, you should disconnect it as well. They can also cause this type of problem.

[RnPgrosz]

You may want to try changing the hd to primary master. Sounds like it could be KIA though

[CrystalMethod]

Dissconnect your CD-Rom if you you haven't already, and connect your Hdd on the last connector of your IDE cable, and see if it sees the Hdd as "primary master".

[WyrmMaster]

clearing the CMOS is always a good starting point. If you can try another harddrive, that would quickly tell if its a harddrive problem or controler problem or not. Maybe try that drive in another system.

[Tithulta]

Well I cleared CMOS and booted withoutt he Hdd connected and boot failed. Cleared CMOS again and reconnected the Hdd. It came up as Primary slave. On the underside of the hdd it has three rows of pins with one jumper.

JP11
SP- I have it on this one
DS
CS

Any idea which of these would be master? Like I said it's an OEM drive made by quantum for Compaq. It came installed on the Compaq I bought as my first computer back in 1995. I ahve an idea to try and will get back to you on how it works out. I forgot about having it installed on my system a few months ago so I could copy WIN98 cab files to it so it could install WIN98 from itself. :) maybe it thinks it's drive letter is something other than C:

At anyrate thanks for all the help and responses. next tiem I think I'll just get my sis to cough up some money for some new parts. :D

[Ottoman]

hmm CS is cable select..

it should say MA, and SL.. for the others...


is there no diagram included on the drive?

[Tithulta]

there is, but it's crazy... let me grab a screen shot of it(hope it's legible). otherwise I'll edit this and try to spell it out.

[Tithulta]

here is the diagram( i found the focus on ym camera :D)

[Tithulta]

here is the actual jumper

[Ridenow]

That diag makes sense to me! Put the jumper on DS for "default/master".
SP is option 2, slave.

[Ridenow]

Let me explain more:

The "jumper configuration table" on the right has 5 options (1-5), there are 5 corisponding columns in the table on the left.

I do not remember what DSP or DASP are exactly, but I am pretty sure it is the "large drive" or "dumb" mode for when your BIOS will not handle a 10GB drive, but will handle 5 2GB virtual drives. Don't worry about it, I don't think you need it


The 5 options are:
1=slave=no jumpers
2=slave(dumb mode)= jumper on SP
3=default/master=jumper on DS
4=master(dumb mode)=jumpers on DS and SP
5=cable select=Jumper on CS, do not put one on SP

[Tithulta]

thanks

now I get Disk error insert system disk to continue etc

I tried each bootable drive letter and all did this.

So i put in a boot disk and booted to DOS

I'm running a DOS scandisk right now

There is no cdrom on this system yet as I'm broke and it's my sisters puter im building so I figure if she wants one she can give me the money to buy it.

No sound is installed ...yet
I can install a network card on it and try transfereing win98 cab files...

So opinions now...is the problem the drive, the ide bus or the ide cable. or any one of the 3....I think i have some spare cables laying around.

[Ridenow]

If you can run scan disk on it then I say it is working, but does not have an OS on it.

[Tithulta]

found the problem....blank hard drive....well sort of it doesn't ahve an OS on it. it does have some files on it I typically install to add in booting up for OS install....guess I need that cdrom now...unless you know how to get a NIC card to work without windows :D

[Ridenow]

Rather than try to get a nic to work with drivers on a floppy you might be better off to borrow the CD-ROM from your computer, load the OS and then put the CD-ROM back.


I actually do know how to make a NIC work off of a floppy, but it is tricky and not worth it.

[Tithulta]

ok thanks....I'd sworn that the drive had an OS installed on it before I took it out of the puter I upgraded for my dad. I have 2 cdroms...one is broekn the other is on it's last leg...might try the last leg and get it installed, but like you said easiest is to unhook either of my other good cdroms and use it to install.

[Tithulta]

it's now running quite well, except one thing. I need my secondary system to be up and running so i unhooked the borrowed mouse,cdrom, and monitor. Well I also want the system to be running for burnin. I have it connected to my LAN so i can monitor it remotely to a small extent, but I can't seem to get it to boot into windows without being able to SEE. I'm assuming you can't disconnect a monitor from a running computer, but I thought I'd check and see. When in doubt my philosphy is leave it be. I know the LAN and all is working fine before I removed the moniter eeeetc etc. so how do you all who have more systems than you do monitors get them up and running in windows? WIN98se is the OS and yes you'd think it was simply wait until it seems to have stopped at the windows log-in and just press enter like I do on my other 2 systems. For some reason though this isn't working for the non-monitored system. SO know I know it's been shut down improperly and thus dunno what's going on with it. I'm about to just shutdown the secondary system and plug int he monitor and get it booted again shut down properly and go from there. Just thought I'd check in first in case it was possible to hot swap the monitor cable. Maybe by turnign off the monitor it's possible, but I'll await for confirmation of that before destroying something i cant afford to replace unless it's free.