The V

This has officially gone beyond HMIS, I think. Or at least I'm pissed off enough that I need actual help.

I am building a new PC from the ground up. The only things I've kept from my old PC are the two hard drives. This has lead to the irritating problem that now that I've put it together, I can't get the damn motherboard to recognize the DVD-RW drive as a bootable drive so that I can actually reinstall Windows and be on my merry way.

The problem seems to be the hard drives and the DVD-RW itself. All three are IDE devices; as I said on my HMIS, I've got only one IDE device directly on the MOBO and more SATA slots than I know what to do with. After much fucking around, I have installed an IDE card in a spare PCI slot. When the computer boots, the MOBO recognizes the two hard drives then the onboard bios for the card finds the DVD-RW. When I switch to the BIOS setup, it doesn't seem to recognize that I have the DVD-RW.

I am at the point of minor mental melt-down. How the *fuck* do I get this thing up and running?

Use the mobo IDE channel to connect the DVD-RW drive and the hard drive you'll be installing Windows to. That way you should be able to tell the BIOS to boot from the DVD-RW.

The only thing I can think of offhand is the drive jumpers. If the DVD-R is on its own IDE channel, do you have it set to Master?

That seems to have done the trick. Prime hard drive is set on master, DVD-RW is on slave and connected directly to the motherboard. the motherboard now actually acknowledges the damn thing, so it's booting.

UNfortunately, and this is going to make me beat my head in with a fucking balpeen hammer, every time I try to run Windows setup I get a new "X is corrupted and/or cannot load" error. So now I'm running memtest to see if i have to replace the fucking brand new RAM.

GAAAH.

Nothing like solving a problem and being rewarded with a fresh, new & even peskier problem.

Assuming the RAM passes the test, are you installing on a freshly formatted drive/partition? Any scratches on the Windows CD?

I'd suggest trying to get Windows to load on the other hard drive. If you don't get the error message, problem solved - sorta. You just have a bad sector on the original drive.

I'm reinstalling windows onto an old drive. I just yanked my two hard drives out of my old computer, bloody and screaming, and plopped 'em into the new one.

This will, ideally, give me a clean registry without having to format the damn drives and back up 2/3rds of the data.

If it turns out that it's not the RAM that's the problem, I will cry. And then drive my ass BACK to fucking CompUSA (where I have been several times today, along with Fry's. No goddamn independent computer parts stores in this town for some reason) and get a new copy of Windows XP and see if that solves anything.

And if it doesn't, then I'm going to cry.

The problem isn't the hard drive; the problem is that it doesn't get past the unpacking-the-files stage to actually start installing the program.

I wouldn't rule out the hard drive just yet as I really don't trust Windows to be able to repair/reinstall/upgrade itself without bolloxing things up. When building a new system, I'd recommend backing up your data and making a separate partition for the OS. That way your data should be safe even if the Windows partition gets hosed.

This page has lots of installation troubleshooting info, might find something useful there.

As I said, it hasn't gotten as far as actually installing yet. The site you sent me more or less nails things down as either a problem with the RAM or the BIOS. If Memtest comes up negative, I'm resetting the defaults on my motherboard and trying again. If <i>that</i> fails, something is getting the Screwdriver of D34th before I go try to find the social shut-in to see about getting it fixed.

It will be a cold day in Hell before I give my baby to the Geek Squad or whatever techjockies they have a CompUSA.

So are you attempting to install Windows to the master of your DVD's slave, or to a hard drive in a completely separate IDE channel?

I'm attempting to reinstall windows to the master drive to which the DVD-RW is chained.

The other drive, on a seperate IDE chain, is strictly storage.

I think it'd be worth it to switch the hard drives around, so you're installing to the one on the separate IDE chain.

I hope no one minds if I revive this thread to fix a problem I have.

Symptoms: Computer powers up, hard drive flickers but then does nothing. Fan just blows and blows. I get nothing on the screen. And yes I checked the monitor and graphics card. They work fine.

Tested: Boot hard drive. It works when I connect it to another computer.

Tested: Power supply. I replaced it with a more powerful PSU. I reconnect the hard drives and the new PSU and same thing. Hard drive flickers and nothing.

Other data: It did seem fairly dusty inside. Perhaps it is the CPU. This is the next thing I checked. I looked at the chip and it looks .. clean? Is there a way to look at it and tell if it is the CPU?

Would RAM also be a problem? How would I test that (obviously I could swap it into another machine -- but is there a different, easier way?).

If it is the motherboard I don't relish tearing everything out either.

Sounds motherboard-ish to me. Caveat: am not a professionally technical person.

Were I to guess, I'd say your BIOS is screwed up.

>>Would RAM also be a problem? How would I test that (obviously I could swap it into another machine -- but is there a different, easier way?).<<

It's either RAM, motherboard or CPU at this stage. For the RAM, if you've multiple pieces in the machine you can test if one of them's bad by removing them all, and booting with only one installed at a time.

Motherboard. Exact same thing happened to me, and at first I thought it was the PSU (replaced it like you did).

Replacing a motherboard is way easier than you'd think.

I'm gonna say motherboard too, based on my own recent almost-identical experience.

You do have a fan on the CPU yes? The motherboard will turn itself off if it finds any problems during start up. A hot processor being one of them.

I should mention that this is a Shuttle PC so replacing the mobo would be quite difficult if in fact they are willing to sell me a replacement.

There is a big heat sink on the CPU that leads to a fan.

Tonight I will try rebooting the bios by replacing the CMOS battery.

And I will try testing the RAM.

Is there any way to know if the CPU is screwed? I looked at it and it didn't show any marks or damage.

Update.. I got it to POST by removing and replacing the CMOS battery. Yay@! Now it will not detect my drives, however...

continuing to troubleshoot...

Update:

I had to go into the CMOS set up to reset it with the right date and with the right boot order.

Success! I was able to boot and get into Windows.

However, it will not do it if I have my graphics card connected. So I am forced to use on-board sound.

What do you think this indicates?

IRQ conflict?

I had something like that happen once, and it turned out it was because the power supply was actually TOO powerful, and it was overloading/short circuiting/whatever my motherboard. The tech guy who figured it out put in a less powerful one and it worked again.

That would be ironic if it turned out the power supply I ordered to fix the problem created another problem.

I guess you mean the on-board graphics? Check the settings for the on-board peripherals in the CMOS setup, you may need to disable the on-board video to get the graphics card working.

Yes, I meant on-board graphics. Good tip.. I will see about doing that. Though I wonder why that would prevent booting...

There may be jumpers that need to be reet on your motherboard.

May I also use this thread for computer-related ignorance?
My 3-yr-old laptop, which is my only PC and gets a reasonable amount of use weekends and some evenings but for nothing more intensive than Firefox, utorrent, Word and Excel, is dying on its arse. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to boot and be ready to use, is often very sluggish for the first 10-20 mins and has random bouts of extreme sluggishness thereafter. I did a full reinstall about 6 months ago which helped but by the time I'd reinstalled necessary software and restored all my documents etc it was as bad as ever. My (40GB) hard drive was pretty full but I've taken a load of music off, got it down to <33 and defragged. Hasn't really helped.

My options seem to be:
1) Get a new main PC, strip the laptop back down to basics and have it for light use and travel
2) Get more RAM for it - I'm told this would likely set me back about £100 and don't know how much difference it would make
3) Something else that I'm not aware of which will make the years fall away

(It's a Toshiba, 1.4GHz Pentium M, 256MB RAM. It was once quite decent.)

Any advice appreciated.

Cheers,
Paul