New problem?? got me stumped...

[240drifter]

Well I'll start off by saying the specs of my system.
Asus A7V-e
512mb pc-133
duron 1GHz
Geforce2 TI 200 64mb
Quantum Fireball 40 Gig
Sony DVD 12x
and the extra blablabla.

Well I started by booting the pc with only video card and ram. Which went fine. installed a preformated hard drive and the post recognizes it, but freezes when looking for operating system or boot device. It stays at that little blinking cursor on the bottom left. Tried with only a floppy drive and same thing the light on the floppy drive stays on and its still at the same screen frozen after the post. When I try with the HD plugged in with the Floppy same thing. Unplug the HD and the floppy posts but does not light up upon searching for boot device. Settings in the BIOS seem fine can't find any settings that would affect my boot devices. I tried with both CDROM, Floppy and HD as the boot device and still no hope.

Does these symptoms ring any bells for any of you gurus out there?

All devices are know working in other systems.

Thanks guys

 

[Theslowone]

Do you have stop on floppy error, or something like that in bios set on? And are you sure you have the floppy connected right, if the cable is connect wrong then this may happen. If you have windows xp/linux on cd, try just with a cd rom with the cd rom set as first boot device and see if it will go any further.

 

[BananaRe]

i think you connected the floppy drive in a wrong way...

 

[240drifter]

I've tried another floppy drive, and another ribbon cable that both were in a working system with same problem. I've tried all combinations of pluggin the floppy drive cable. Its not staying on all the time like if it was plugged in backwards. It initializes like it should at the post then turns off. But stays on when looking for boot device. I tried booting up with Redhat 7.0 with no avail. That's why its got me stumped. It will still freeze on floppy even if there's no disk inserted in the drive.

 

[veryape]

Do you have the drives jumpered correctly? Also go in the bios and make sure you have halt on no errors selected so no matter what it boots.

 

[240drifter]

Theslowone
the jumpers are correct and the bios is still set to halt on no errors.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Try clearing the CMOS. Also, What is the CPU temp after a few minutes in the bios? Reseating the CPU and the ram can solve strange boot problems sometimes as well.

 

[240drifter]

I tried clearing the cmos before. I don't think that my cpu is the problem since I'm stopping at the same point all the time, right after the post. I'm pretty sure the board that is a lemon since I taught that it might be shorting out so I took it out of the case and started over piece by piece and still same thing. So thanks for the help guys.

 

[Texun]

I had something sort of like that a while back but I can't remember what I was trying to do. All I remember of the event was that it really had me screwed for a while. .... Wait! Now I remember. I flashed the BIOS and the BIOS was buggy. Tried to flash it back and it would not boot up from the floppy. I had the exact problem, post and then freeze. Tried the default settings... no go. Tried another floppy drive.... no go. I just knew it couldn't be the boot floppy because I had just made it on another PC not more than a few hours before the flash.

Turns out that something somewhere wrote to my boot disk and made it non-bootable. I didn't get an error saying "Invalid system disk," or anything like that, just a blinking cursor after the post. Made a new boot disk and it did the same thing. Made another one and write protected it. That got me in and I reflashed the BIOS.

Not sure if this helps, but I learned to never assume the boot disk is good just because it worked an hour before. Something odd was screwing with my boot floppy.

R