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Help with old system I'm putting together...

H

Hork

Senior member
I recently bought a case with a 300W PS and a Gigabyte 7ZMMH mobo. Installed a 1GHz Athlon t-bred and 256MB RAM. I have a 40GB hd with no OS on it, no floppy, and an old 1X CD-ROM drive.

The mobo has integrated video, so I have no other cards installed. I have the hard drive on primary ide as master, and the CD drive on secondary as master.

I get really inconsistent results when I boot up. Sometimes I'm able to get into the BIOS. It can detect the hd and CDROM okay, but it gives weird results for the listings for extended memory (like 7MB or 11MB -- seems to vary).

At this state, I can navigate the entire BIOS and set stuff.

I set the BIOS to boot from CDROM first and IDE-0 second. I get prompted to press a key to boot from CD. I have my Windows XP install in the CDROM, but it won't install. Sometimes I get an error saying there isn't enough extended memory. Other times it just goes black and does nothing.

I tried swapping out the CDROM drive for a faster, newer one, but when I do and try to go into the BIOS, if I enter into one of the subsections of the BIOS it locks up and only displays part of the information for that page. I can't navigate out and have to reboot.

Recommendations for getting this up and running? Should I install a floppy instead and flash BIOS, update drivers, etc? I'd like to install Windows XP from the CD to the hard drive.

Any idea why the BIOS flakes out like that?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
 
1X CD ROMs are often NOT standard IDE interfaces though they may have the same connector (Mitsumi, Panasonic, etc.). Remember how the old sound cards used to have a forest of connectors on them for the different CD players? So you may have damaged the secondary IDE channel and/or the mobo... Try disabling the primary IDE channel in the BIOS, then hook your HD to the secondary channel and see if it is detected. If not then you may have to get a PCI IDE controller (Syba from dealsonic.com < $25. shipped - very flexible) or RMA the mobo.
. You might want to use a floppy to get started and load the CD ROM drivers (you can get boot disks all over the place) and then install the OS from CD.
.bh.

Where's the :sun:?
 
The cdrom is probably the problem, but what does the cpu detect at when you do see something. Wrong cpu multiplier and bus speeds can do really weird things.
 
I agree with Zepper; I've never actually ever seen a 1X IDE CD-ROM, and I've seen plenty of CD-ROMs in my day.

When you say "detects the HD and CD-ROM ok" - what does it display for the CD-ROM make/model number? I'm actually a tad bit curious.
 
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