Why won't this boot?

O

Operaghost

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 4, 2004
Messages
1,315
I just replaced my PSU.

Reconnect all the power to my mobo, 2 IDE HDD, 1 SATA HDD, and my Video Card.

It wouldn't boot past "Verifying DMI Pool Data". So I checked all the connections and everything is solid. So I was starting to think maybe I hosed the boot sector on my main drive, but when I disconnected the power from my 2 storage drives, then it booted right up. What I don't get is that I haven't changed any jumpers on any of the HDD's so I don't get why it won't read my main drive to boot. When the other 2 storage drives are connected, they show as Primary Master/Slave, and the main drive will show as Secondary Master (even though it isn't on IDE, its on SATA). However, when I unhook the power from the 2 IDE storage drives, then my main drive shows as Primary Master and boots up fine.


Anyone got any ideas on why it won't boot from the SATA drive when all 3 are connected?
 
In BIOS, is the SATA drive set up to boot from that first? Maybe the two IDE drives and a cd-rom drive are set as the boot drives and the SATA isn't even on the list to look at for the OS.
 
It sounds like a hard drive/cabling/motherboard or CMOS config problem.
Try plugging in each drive separately to see if one of them causes the problem.
 
I loaded the "Optimized" and "Fail Safe" defaults, and still had the same result.

Do you mean clearing the CMOS?

I just don't understand 2 things.
1. Why are the IDE drives are being set as the primary and not the SATA drive.
2. If it can't find a boot sector on either of the IDE drives, why doesn't it attempt to find one on the SATA drive?
 
Sparky: Yes, the 2 IDE drives are detected as the primary master/slave, and the SATA drive is detected as secondary master.

The boot order is set to:

1. Floppy
2. HDD
 
Opera: Your system was working fine till you replaced the PSU? Did you try different connectors from the PSU --> HDD ?
 
Operaghost said:
Sparky: Yes, the 2 IDE drives are detected as the primary master/slave, and the SATA drive is detected as secondary master.

The boot order is set to:

1. Floppy
2. HDD
Click to expand...

Ah, if the individual drives arent present for selection, there will be another menu where you can choose the order of the hard drives.
 
Ok My mobo is an Asus IC7-MAX3. I've never seen anywhere in the bios where I can rearrange the boot order of my detected hard disks.

So currently, I reset the cmos via the onboard jumper, disconnected the 2 IDE drives both power and ide cable. I powered back up, loaded the BIOS, and the SATA drive was detected as the primary master. Saved the settings, and exited, booted up, and here I am.

My question now is, should my IDE drives be connected on the IDE2 channel of the mobo? Will that put them into the "secondary" position? I've always had them on the IDE1 channel, and my SATA drive on SATA1.
 
Putting your IDE drives on the 2ndary channel wont make a difference. If the hd is bootable, and the partition set to active, the system will try to boot off of it. BIOS's almost always allow you to change the boot order of the system, unless you have some crappy ass proprietary dell with a stripped down bios, which as youve stated, you dont have.
 
Ok, I'll dig through every menu in my BIOS and see if I can find it. If there is one, I'm ashamed of myself :eek:
 
Ok....I can never show my face on this forum again....

problem solved

Thanks everyone for the ideas, I'm gonna go cry in the corner now.
 
Please share what you did to resolve this issue, there might be others with a similar problem.
 
FU Hippy!

I've been in and around and through that BIOS hundreds of times, I guess I just always ignored the boot menu cause I never had problems booting before.

Anyways, thanks again folks, can't believe I've never seen that menu before.
 
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