grapeape

dell dimension p3 384mg
maxtor hard drive
samsung cd
cd-rw
win98 os
norton av 2002 last vd 11/5/03 last system scan 11/3/03

first touched this pc about 6 months ago and never could get it to start in normal mode. would always change itself to selective startup.

typically device manager shows no problems.

last night ran adaware and added a second hard drive and ribbon cable. since then computer does not start with cd (either) or printer s available.

currently device manger shows exclamation under hard drive controller for both primary and secondary ide controller (dual fifo). tried running driver update and it says that best driver in use after installing and running(so it indicates)to c:\woindows\temp\direct.b1.
removed new cable and hard drive and put old cable back on. reseated cable for cd drives and at the board. went into bios and restored system defaults. changed boot order to cd first. restarted with mcaffe in cd drive, which indicated boot sector could not be read. no viruses found.

restart normal mode still can not see cd drives in my computer.

checked norton quarantine and interesting enuf there was nimda, klez and an unknown dated 4/30/02. which is 3 days after the last restorable good registry file of 4/27/02.

my question is there a way to delete and replace the master boot record to get rid of any bugs in there with out hosing the whole system? am i wrong in suspecting the mbr and should i be taking other steps?

was suggested that i do the following;
make a boot floppy.. boot with it and get to the A: prompt. at the prompt type

FDISK /MBR
hit enter

that will rebuild the master boot record.

and asked about;
I don't see in your description anything about making the BIOS run Autodetect for the two drives,
I don't see anything about your jumper for the slave drive being set to slave and the drive connected to the middle connector of the IDE 0 cable (or, as Kodo suggested, set to Cable Select, but still on the middle connector) with the first drive's jumper set FOR SURE to Master and on the end connector,
and I don't see anything about the jumper settings for the two CD drives.


the second drive is completely out till i get the sys back to where it was. now when i first put it in the original was jumpered to master and the 2nd one i was adding had no jumper, and it was on the middle of the cable. when i got a no operating sys message with that config i opened back up and put jumper on the second drive for slave. still got same message so opened back up and disconnected the drive all together. system then started but without the cd drives werkin.

didnt check jumpers on the cd's cause they were workin last night. yes bios on autodetect for the drives. and remeber it sees the drives just not in windows.

tried above suggestion. hard restart with boot disk in floppy, set to removable device first boot. fdisk /mbr at the a: got it back did a hard reboot with out the disk in. back into bios changed to cd first boot. soft booted and came up in norton disk. still wouldnt scan boot section


tanks in advance,
roy