Help me and my mother-in-law's computer

[jimmyj0668]

This is older equipment. My mother-in-law wanted WIN XP on her computer to replace WIN ME. She has an MSI 815E Pro (MS-6337) mobo with 256 meg memory and an 866 meg pentium III. I thought it a good idea to boost her machine a little so I put in a 1 gig pentium III and 512 meg of memory. I ended up having to remove the motherboard in order to release the catches/clamps on the intel heatsink/fan. I tried it without removing the board and was having no luck. The screwdriver would slip of the clamp and strike the motherboard and that didn't seem like a good idea. After switching out the CPU and installing the new memory sticks I replaced the motherboard added in an extra hard drive in order to perserve some photos of the new great-grandchild (I'm a grand dad now!) that were on her original Maxtor 40 gig harddrive by copying them over to the old WD hard drive I had around before taking her maxtor to format before installing WIN XP. System booted up fine but stopped dead at the final boot page - cpu info memory info etc. This particular mobo has diagnostic lights on the board which tell you everything is AOK with 5 green led's. I was getting 4 green LED's and the red one indicated according to the MOBO manual "Check IDE cable for proper installation". I have removed and reinstalled the ide cable a nunber of times. I replaced the IDE cable. I checked and rechecked the connectors, the pins on the connectors, each hard drive and its pins, tried each hard drive alone and you name it. The drives power up but there is, apparently, no operating signals what so ever. The hard drive LED doesn't even flicker (I checked the connector for the HDD LED, both ways on the two pins). It will go into setup from boot and all settings indicated AOK, including the two hard drives being in the system. Yet it will not finsh boot to the operating system and the board diagnostics say check the IDE cables. Anybody have some idea as to what is happening here? Sorry this is so long but I wanted to give as much info as possible.

 

[andypress]

I assume that you have tried this, but did you make sure you have the jumpers right?

 

[tjaisv]

yeah make sure the Maxtor's jumper is set to Master, and if it's sharing its IDE cable with the WD drive, make sure the WD drive is set to Slave

 

[jimmyj0668]

Thanks andypress , but I didn't change any jumpers.

 

[jimmyj0668]

What I meant was, -- not on the motherboard. I did change the WD jumper to slave. I didn't change anything on the Maxtor - mainly because I didn't know if changes were necessary and the drive does not have jumper diagrams on it. When I first built this unit back in 2001, I had something that told me how to set the Maxtor jumpers but I no longer have that and don't remember if the present setting which is, looking from the 4 pin power plug left, a vertical jumper on the last two pins and a horizontal jumper on the two adjacent pins at the top. Maybe this is incorrect for acting as a master drive. I don't know - anyone?

 

[Propellorhead]

try this:

http://www.maxtor.com/_files/m..._settings/style_a1.htm

 

[jimmyj0668]

Thanks propellorhead, I went to Maxtor earlier and found the subject hard drive and the settings of the jumpers are correct for master function as are the settings for the WD as set for slave. BIOS reads out the drives perfecty as the maxtor on primary ide master and the wd as the primary ide slave. Maybe I should transfer this query to the high tech side of the forum.

 

[Zepper]

If you are using an 80-wire cable (which you should be), perhaps setting the drives both to Cable Select would work. Just make sure the one you want to be master is on the end and the slave in the middle (unless the cable itself is marked differently). And make sure the blue connector on the cable is plugged into the mobo.
. The Highly Technical section is NOT for stuff like this - it actually belongs in the Tech Support section.
.bh.

 

[jimmyj0668]

Thanks Zepper, I'll try the cable select setup and if no result, I'll go to tech support. Thanks to all who responded.