Harddrive won't boot after MB & processor upgrade

[jclose]

I am hoping you all can help me out on this one.

I upgraded my motherboard and processor the other day, and every since then my system drive won't boot. It says, "Boot Disk Failure, insert System Disk and press return" (or something along those lines). This drive was working perfectly well when I was using in the previous installation.

At first I was thinking it was WinXP causing the problems. I have upgraded things before and had to over-install XP again to get it working. But in those cases doesn't the system at least start to boot, but then hang at the MUP.SYS file? Anyway, I tried the over-install and it still doesn't work.

I bet you all are wondering what the specifics are, eh?
__________
- ECS Nforce3-A MB (SATA & PATA Raid capable, but disabled now; only 1 drive)
- Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (6L020L1) 20GB UATA harddrive; Master drive on channel 1
- Windows XP, SP2 OS (only OS on the drive)
- BIOS boot order is correct (i.e. it is set to boot from the drive)
_____________

One possibly odd bit of information: The Maxtor support website and documentation say that when manually defining the CHS parameters in BIOS to not use anything over 16383 cylinders. But if I enter that number in the BIOS it only gives me an 8GB drive; the auto detect feature turns up ~39000 cylinders. (I explored this information based on a suggestion someone made based on his personal experience: if the cylinders aren't right it won't know where/how to boot. He found the auto detect to be wrong.)

Thanks!

 

[CraigRT]

Well in all honesty, I've had SO many problems with those types of hard drives in the past, i wouldn't be surprised if it has just crashed.

But, it could also be a setting issue if you get a disk boot failure.. that means it's not even able to begin booting normally. Also, the Mup.sys file is not necessarily the file the safe mode boot is getting stuck on, it's just the last file in the list before the desktop shows up, and doesn't really tell anyone anything unfortunately

I've seen a lot of systems hang on mup.sys and that's only because something else is wrong after mup.sys has already been processed.

 

[corkyg]

A motherboard upgrade most often requires a completely fresh install of Windows XP. Add to that, the CPU, and everything in your old HDD load list is wrong. A mobo upgrade also introduces a different BIOS - that further complicates the problem. A mobo change generally equals a different computer.

 

[jclose]

Well, I got a hold of the Maxtor disk utilities and ran those on the drive. It passed all of the tests that I put it through (I didn't run the Burn In test). I also updated the motherboard BIOS. None of this has helped, unfortunately. It still gives me the BOOT DISK FAILURE.

I have upgraded the motherboard and processor on this system and one other one before and not needed to do a clean install. I had to do what I called an over-install. It is the same process as the clean install but without the formatting and wiping of data. I still have all of my installed programs and files on the partition. I do have to go through and update Windows again, though. But I have tried the over-install without any luck this time.

Regardless of that it still sticks in my mind that I was still able to get it started booting at least. Not having the drive start booting is new to me in this situation.

 

[zerocool84]

na trust us when we say it, it happens all the time, it's VERY COMMON, just reformat cus you'll still have all your old drivers from your mobo and stuff anyways mine as well just reformat anyways, just happened when i got my NF3 mobo and 3000+ i reformatted cus i knew it wouldn't boot up and low and behold it didn't

 

[furballi]

Not sure why people still do a 1/2 ass job. Backup important data in another partition on the same hard drive and wipe the C primary active partition. Always clean install windows for 100% compatibility.

 

[JE78]

I think thats one of the first things I learned about mobo, CPU upgrades. Backup, format, reinstall.

 

[hugekebab]

agreed, hot swapping rarely works and is at best problematic.

 

[RollWave]

is your boot order set ok? Maybe you forgot to put the hard drive as oneo and its trying to boot from your CD drive?

 

[jclose]

I think I have figured out the problem. The old MB was just plain IDE, the new one has RAID capable on the IDE ports. I ran into an issue trying to recover data from the drive that wouldn't boot on the new MB. The data recovery programs that I was trying would always lock up the computer when I started the scan of that drive. But that drive connected to the old MB (without RAID) the data recovery software doesn't lock up. Must be something about the RAID controller that is getting in the way.

But a brand new drive connected to the new MB with RAID was partitioned and formatted, installed and booted without a single hitch. Kind of odd.