Computer not Booting

[skyeclad]

I recently upgraded my Mobo and CPU and I ended up needing to perform a repair installation. Somehow along the way, the system has decided that it doesn't know where to go to boot-up. The Bios indicates to boot from a removable then a HDD. However, when it stalls after posting. If I hit F8 before that I get a Boot screen which allows me to choose the Master HDD and voila. Everything's fine. Do I have to do something in the BIOS or is there a boot record issue?

Asus A8N-E

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 512K 90nm Rev. E Venice

RAM - DDR (400) 3200 - 1 GB (2 pcs 512) OCZ

ATI (Connect3D) Radeon X800 XL 256MB DDR/PCI-E/TV-Out/VGA/DVI

OCZ OCZ45012U ModStream ATX 2.0 450W Power Supply

 

[LiLithTecH]

If you changed the model\brand motherboard & CPU it would be a wise
idea to do a FRESH INSTALL of the OS.

You will have better performance and less problems down the line.

 

[stevty2889]

I would double check your boot order in the BIOS, and be sure to set the hard drive as the first boot drive, or set the DVD/CD drive as the first, and the hard drive as the second. You may also have an option for hard disk boot order, make sure it's set to your bootable hard drive.

 

[skyeclad]

I checked the boot order and it was set to removable first and then HDD. I switched it to HDD first and then CD-ROM. Then I reboot and after posting, nothing. I hit any key and it says "Disk Boot Failure. Insert a system disk."

What I don't understand is that I assume it's trying to boot from the Master HDD. That's ok because when I hit F8, I always choose the HDD Master and it then loads Boot Magic. I choose the installation that I want and voila, it all works. Do you think I have a corrupt boot sector or something and how can I fix this?

 

[stevty2889]

Your using boot magic? I'll take it you have multiple operating systems, what are they and in what order were they installed? Also, try disabling all other boot devices in the bios, other than the hard drive.

EDIT: also, if you have mulitple OS's and did a repair install of windows xp after upgrading, it probably screwed up your boot.ini file.

 

[amdskip]

Format c: my friend 2nded. Backup and wipe it clean and start fresh. It's not worth the struggles.

 

[skyeclad]

I do have BootMagic because I cloned a HDD and boot from that one because it's faster. The C:\ drive is a secondary slave drive now.

If I did screw up my boot.ini, how do I fix it?

 

[skyeclad]

Problem solved but in a very odd way.

Two nights ago, my power went out in my house. My PC was on during the outage and I found that it was off when I got home. So I booted up and noticed a checksum error in my BIOS and all the setting were wiped.

So I changed my settings and reboot and I had a worse error this time. My was corrupted and needed to be reflashed. So I put in my CDROM and began to restore the BIOS. The first attempt failed because there was a bad block. Not knowing what to do I pulled the battery out and cleared the CMOS. I then re-attempted the flash and this time it copied over nicely.

When I went into the BIOS set-up I noticed that some of the screens were a little different so I figured that I must have flashed an older version. Anyhow, I rebooted and it began to boot straight from the HDD this time AND it recognized my RAM as DDR400 automatically whereas before I had to set it at 400Mhz manually. So I suppose I had a BIOS problem all along.