Just about the time I think I have seen every kind of problem in a new system, I get humbled again <sigh>.
I built an economy system for a friend based on an AOPEN MK77M ll motherboard, 256MB of Kingston PC2100 DDR memory, and Athlon XP 1800+.
I took their running hard drive and CD-ROM plus a new floppy to complete the box (Enlight 7250 w/300 PS).
When booting, it finds the CPU and memory quickly as it should, then hesitates in finding the IDE drives . . . probably 30-60 seconds, then finally finds them. the rest of the boot is at the same slow motion. Setting the boot order to CD - A: - C:, it will eventually boot to my Norton Antivirus CD, and also a Win98 boot floppy, but will not boot to the hard drive.
Jumpers, etc. on the motherboard seem to be right, and everything in CMOS seems to be as it should. I even tried clearing the CMOS, and changing the IDE cables, checked the hard drive with FDISK to see that it was a bootable primary partition, all with no help. Having run out of ideas, I decided to change the jumper on the hard drive to Cable Select.
Instant success, in that it now recognized the hard drive and the CD-ROM (slave on the secondary channell) almost instantly, but still denied that C: was a bootable drive.
Quite by accident, I discovered that if I used my Norton Antivirus CD to boot to its menu screen and select Boot From the Hard Drive, it would then successfully boot to Windows (98SE). Thinking that there must be something wrong with the boot block, I took a big shotgun approach and reinstalled Win98SE over itself. Still no help!
As long as I use a bootable CD to prime the pump, it will boot from the HDD . . . otherwise, it is a no-go.
Any Ideas on what I may have missed or what may be defective???
I built an economy system for a friend based on an AOPEN MK77M ll motherboard, 256MB of Kingston PC2100 DDR memory, and Athlon XP 1800+.
I took their running hard drive and CD-ROM plus a new floppy to complete the box (Enlight 7250 w/300 PS).
When booting, it finds the CPU and memory quickly as it should, then hesitates in finding the IDE drives . . . probably 30-60 seconds, then finally finds them. the rest of the boot is at the same slow motion. Setting the boot order to CD - A: - C:, it will eventually boot to my Norton Antivirus CD, and also a Win98 boot floppy, but will not boot to the hard drive.
Jumpers, etc. on the motherboard seem to be right, and everything in CMOS seems to be as it should. I even tried clearing the CMOS, and changing the IDE cables, checked the hard drive with FDISK to see that it was a bootable primary partition, all with no help. Having run out of ideas, I decided to change the jumper on the hard drive to Cable Select.
Instant success, in that it now recognized the hard drive and the CD-ROM (slave on the secondary channell) almost instantly, but still denied that C: was a bootable drive.
Quite by accident, I discovered that if I used my Norton Antivirus CD to boot to its menu screen and select Boot From the Hard Drive, it would then successfully boot to Windows (98SE). Thinking that there must be something wrong with the boot block, I took a big shotgun approach and reinstalled Win98SE over itself. Still no help!
As long as I use a bootable CD to prime the pump, it will boot from the HDD . . . otherwise, it is a no-go.
Any Ideas on what I may have missed or what may be defective???
