What happened...

[mrmagoo_83]

OK so I am redoing my mother's P4 1.6GHz I built her a few years ago. It had Win98 and was starting to hose up, so I figured I would put XP on it. Well, I had some issues getting the CDROMs to boot up windows, but finally did, but still had some trouble getting other software loaded.

She had been complaining about the CDROMs as well, I just figured it was nothing, or it was just acting up. So I decide something was wrong with Windows, or one of the CDROMs was going bad. I shut it off, pull both CDROMs, and put a good CDROM I had laying around in, reboot and bam! I get an error message about some config file on the hard drive is missing, please attempt a repair from the windows cd. Ok fine, I will just toss the CD in and boot from it...wrong. Now this damn thing will not boot from a floppy, the cdrom, or the hdd.

Any clues? I have disconnected everything except the HDD, Floppy, CDROM, and Vid Card. And tried different combinations trying to get something to boot. But still nothing. I have reset the CMOS, same results, nothing. So now I am lost, and stuck.

The only thing I can think of thats left is the IDE controller on the board died or something.
Any thoughs?

 

[z-lite]

Most likely the motherboard with a faulty controller or you generated static to a component and now it's acting up.