[Vulcano]

Ok, went out and bought some new goodies:

Athlon XP 1800 1.53 Ghz
Gigabyte 7VRXP motherboard
GeForce4 4400 Ti 128MB RAM
Antec case w/400 watt power supply
Maxtor 60 GB 7200 RPM hard drive

After post, everything seems to be detected in BIOS. The maxtools recognize the DVD-ROM (creative labs) even by serial number. I formatted with the maxtor tools and everything was go. When I reboot, the system fails to start loading windows 98 from either the start-up floppy or the CD. So I tried rebooting with the maxtools floppy and it came up with no problems. Again I try to boot up windows from both DVD-ROM and floppy. It starts churning the floppy and then it hangs...no install, no error message or beeps, it just hangs on a single, diabolically simple cursor on screen. I loaded up that floppy in my old system and it's fine, both the software and the disk. I loaded the CD in my old system and it is fine (both the software and the CD). Both the DVD-ROM and the floppy are in excellent working condition. What is causing this? What extra information do you need?

 

[Jason]

How do you have the drives booting in cmos?

 

[Vulcano]

1st: floppy
2nd: cd-rom
3rd: ide0

I have tried every combination.

 

[TheTechIsIn]

Does the system recognize the entire RAM amount?

 

[SPEEDO]

Have you tried clearing the cmos?

Also set bios defaults afterwards.....Sorry no smilies available at this time.

 

[Vulcano]

Yes to RAM and yes to CMOS reset, tried both optimized, fail safe defaults, and custom.

I have isolated the problem. Something is going horribly wrong with the maxblast hard drive formatting software. When making a bootable partition, it asks for a boot disk for windows. I put it in, it takes it, then formats as normal. The problem is in the fact that I don't have ATAPI driver for the cd-rom...and that should be on the boot diskette (and it is, in fact, but somehow that never gets loaded). So, I now have to figure out how to install a driver for the cd-rom when I have no OS at all. Any ideas?

 

[Jason]

You can load dos drivers. I'm not at work, and my desk is horibley messy here or else I would send you some mitsumi drivers that work with 99% of the drives out there.

 

[Vulcano]

How do I load DOS drivers without DOS? I get no prompt at all when rebooting after format. If I had DOS, I could install the drivers from the boot disk. The maxblast software comes with a rudimentary and proprietary DOS that loads up the formatting program, but it can do nothing with microsoft applications (believe me, I tried...I get error improper MS DOS version message).

 

[Jason]

Ok, when it asks you to put in the dos disk what disk are you putting in? Also what ver of maxblast do you have? Is that the only disk that will boot off your system?

 

[Vulcano]

I'm not putting in a DOS disk, as I don't have one. I'm trying to get either the windows 98 boot diskette or the windows 98 CD to boot (and can't do either). The only disk that will boot from a:\ or any other is the maxblast plus II v1.3 which I downloaded from the maxtor site yesterday.

 

[Jason]

Ok, have you tried a boot disk from http://www.bootdisk.com ?

 

[Vulcano]

Duh. I tried a different hard drive (reformatting as I went) and it booted right up. So pissed. All that work and it was a bad hard drive. What I don't understand is, how can the maxtor software recognize it and the BIOS doesn't? oh well. I got a better deal on an 80 gig western digital and I can exchange the crap HD towards a creative 5.1 dolby surround speaker system.