A7M266 Issues!!

[Snolan]

I'm down to the last straw. I recently purchased an A7M266 and 1.33 AMD T-Bird along with DDR RAM. I intended to upgrade my A7V. My intent was to keep the WORKING and BOOTING HDD and boot initially before reloading my OS (98SE).

I then installed the new MB, CPU, and RAM. I cannot get the BIOS to detect my HDD. It is a Seagate Barracuda ATA II, and not some generic. The IDE LED blinks initially at power up and I can hear it spinning. The CPU is detected and the RAM is fine. However, when POST attempts to detect the Primary and Secondary IDEs, the message indicates failure. Thus, when it attempts to boot I get the following message:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

Here are the tests I've tried:
- I've used multiple ATA100/66 cables, one of which worked on the old MB to no avail
- I've set the CHS settings manually and still nothing happens (I haven't tried PIO 3 or 4)
- I rebuilt my PC with old the old A7V motherboard to check if the HDD was damage during the upgrade with the same old cable. It works fine.

I remember an issue like this on my A7V. The A7V has 4 IDE Ports. One Primary and Secondary Pair is Promise ATA100 and the other pair is plain IDE. The ATA 100 IDE ports would not boot from my HDD. I was forced to use the old IDE Ports to boot up and install the Promise ATA Controller drivers. I then connected the HDD to the ATA 100 IDE port. After this, the MB BIOS still would not detect any IDE devices, however a new Promise detection occured after the MB BIOS. The Promise detection would find the HDD.

I don't have this luxury with the A7M it only has two ATA100/66/33 IDE ports.

Does the A7M266 MB BIOS detect the ATA100/66/33 IDE Ports or is there some other PCI Bus Master detection that needs to be activated? Is there a problem with the controler and thus the MB defective?

I'm in dire need and am most likely gonna return the Board.

:frown:

 

[Buz2b]

Mine had no problem finding my Primary drive, an UDMA 100 type. If you got into the BIOS did you make sure the settings were at Auto for the IDE's? Have you tried selecting them? That's about all I can think of. Other than that get/borrow another drive and try to boot from that. If it works, put the problematic one as slave and try FDISK/Format. If that works remove the borrowed one and replace with your drive. Should work then.
BTW, you should remove your other, somewhat duplicate post. Sound kind of whiney to some and will get flamed as being in the wrong forum. Just my .02c worth.

<< DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER >>

Another thought, did you have a boot disk and OS CD in???