[rda101]

I have just bought a new motherboard, (Gigabyte ga-7nnxp running an Athlon 900) and whacked it together. Problem is it can't read the cd-rw drive. In the initial memory-test screen, it detects the hard disk and dvd-rom, but when it actually tries to boot from the dvd-rom, it can't read it. The drive is powered up, but when it tried to boot from it, the read light doesn't come on and it just sits there. I am wanting to intall a fresh OS, but it doesn't seem to be able to see any of the IDE drives.

Is there some bios setting I have overlooked?
Any help would be very welcome.

 

[Deadlus]

Because of johnwill, I am taking off my advice since he doesn't appreciate what I do here for you people! You should thank his rudeness for this.

Edit by Deadlus

 

[johnwill]

Because of johnwill, I am taking off my advice since he doesn't appreciate what I do here for you people! You should thank his rudeness for this.

Don't let the door hit you in the behind.

 

[johnwill]

I have just bought a new motherboard, (Gigabyte ga-7nnxp running an Athlon 900) and whacked it together. Problem is it can't read the cd-rw drive. In the initial memory-test screen, it detects the hard disk and dvd-rom, but when it actually tries to boot from the dvd-rom, it can't read it. The drive is powered up, but when it tried to boot from it, the read light doesn't come on and it just sits there. I am wanting to intall a fresh OS, but it doesn't seem to be able to see any of the IDE drives.

Start with the basics. Set the BIOS setup to factory defaults first, and check all the cables carefully. If you have one, try another 80 conductor cable. Also, can you just connect the hard disk to the Primary Master connection and see it with a boot disk from www.bootdisk.com? If so, then connect the CD-RW drive and see if you can read it. This could be a number of things, you need to start narrowing it down.

BTW, you mention DVD-ROM and CD-RW, do you have two optical drives? How are you connecting the drives? Have you tried just connecting the HD to the primary IDE controller, and the CD-RW drive to the secondary IDE controller, using two cables?

 

[rda101]

I've checked and double checked the jumpers and cables, and at last I found the reason:-

The reason I thought it wasn't seeing them was because it was doing an IDE scan when the RAID feature was booting, just after the memory test screen. This IDE scan was saying "no drives found", which I'm assuming is due to the raid not being set up yet? I really dont know too much about raid and all that serial ATA jazz...

I had been trying to install Windows XP to my 120Gb hard disk (well a 30Gig partition of it). Don't know why, but the Windows XP cd was not booting, so i tried my old Windows 98 cd. This booted, but unfortunately it didn't install right, due to the large disk size?

Currently in the process of using a smaller drive, installing 98 then upgrading to XP. Long winded, but I hope to hell it works...

 

[SPEEDO]

You could have fdisked and and formatted the drive using a Win98 boot disk. Then choose boot with CD-Rom support and stick the XP CD into the drive and select the drive probably "E" and type setup.

When asked you must choose to install to a current partition not create a new one.

The only thing wrong with this type of setup is that you can only use the FAT32 file system.

 

[rda101]

Tried that, but it must be an upgrade version(?) I've laid my hands on, because it claims it can't run the setup in DOS mode.
I've installed W98, then installed all the motherboard drivers, then tried to do an upgrade install to WXP, but it always locks up when trying to boot into windows, meaning I have to cancel the install.

Anyway, I think this is turning into a software problem now- Time for a new thread.


(Luddites had the right idea...)

 

[SPEEDO]

Strange because that is how I load mine if I want to use FAT32 on a drive larger than 32 gig.