Abit board won't boot

phazed

Junior Member
Jun 14, 2003
10
0
0
I was wondering if anybody has ever seen this happen or know how to fix it...

I have an Abit KR7A (KT266A chipset) motherboard that won't boot from any HD. Here's what happens after POST:

Verifying DMI...
GRUB

That's it... just... GRUB. The only reference I can find is a linux bootloader. Win2k Pro was installed on the machine. I can boot from CD's and read the HD without any problems. I've swapped IDE cables, flashed to the most recent BIOS, run memtest x86 (no errors). I've tried reinstalling win2k... after the files copy and it wants to reboot, it just says "GRUB" again at the point where it would start loading the OS. I even went as far as burning a redhad installation iso to try to install it... I got some sort of error that locked the installation process (I couldn't use the scrollbar at that point to figure out what the error was).

I also downloaded the most recent F-PROT for DOS on another computer and burned it to a bootable CD-- it didn't find anything (made sure to scan bootsector).

I'm about out of ideas... I'm running the win2k pro install again (bootable install) and letting it format the drive. I'm pretty sure the board is just fried somehow, but I'm hoping that someone might have seen this before (or can at least tell me what the GRUB is).

Thanks
 

burnedout

Diamond Member
Oct 12, 1999
6,249
2
0
OK, I don't know why your machine suddenly began acting up. However, since you receive "GRUB" when the boot loader starts, the boot sector must be repaired or Win2K will never start. If you ran LILO for the boot loader, you would probably receive the LILO message instead.

If you are undertaking a complete reinstallation of the OS, and have no regard for the data currently on the drive, do this:

Download a DOS utility called Zap-It

Save the utility to a DOS disk. Boot with the DOS disk and run the utility. This will wipe out the boot sector.

Run Fdisk and format according to taste such as FAT or NTFS, and reinstall the OS.

Keep in mind that if you need your data from the drive, do not run Zap-It before recovering the data.

 

phazed

Junior Member
Jun 14, 2003
10
0
0
It turns out that the primary HD was hosed... after staring at the post screen for so long, I finally noticed that my Maxtor drive was reading Mahtor with some ascii garbage after it... I ended up tossing the drive (it was only 15gigs), putting the 2nd HD as primary, formatted it and all is now well...

Thanks for your help guys