New rig, problem with CD RW

[Prasanta]

I have recently assembled an AMD system with Gigabyte GA-7ZMMH MB, Athlon XP 1700+, 40GB HDD, 1.44 FDD and an ASUS 24X CDRW. Though I am able to boot from my floppy and my HDD, when I put a bootable CD in my CD R/W, it is giving "Boot Record Not found" error.

When I put the CD inside, the Read LED starts blinking and continues for a while but at last it gives a message 'Boot system not found'.

I tried booting from Floppy with Win 98 boot disk choosing the option to boot with CD suport. In that case, I can see the CD as a drive but when I am trying to do a DIR operation on the CD drive it is giving error.

The Bios is set up properly. When the system Boots up, it detects the CD RW correctly (as ASUS.. I can't see the whole thing as it is cleared very fast). During boot up, the CD READ LED blinks properly. When I put a CD in it, the system tries to read it for long (READ LED flickering) and then says that OS not found. My other PC boots readily with this CD!

After I installed Win 98, Win recognises that there is a CD drive present but when I go to see the contents it says 'Device Not ready'

Both the HDD and the CD RW are installen on 1st IDE Cahnnel HDD as master and CD as Slave.

Can someone please help.

Regards,
Prasanta.:disgust:

 

[lsman]

do u try to move your cdrw to another channel? IDE2 ? you may find this is faster when copy data from hd to cd because computer can not read/write on the same channel at the same time. sometimes, they just do not play nice together.

recheck the jumper of hard drive and cdrw,
recheck the IDE cable, unplug and plug, all red line should be on '1' of drives or the close to the door side of a case.

In BIOS, 'detect hard drive' may give you idea that the BIOS is indeed know the drive. some will unplug the keyboard to "stop" the computer for a while in order to see the screen.

 

[Buz2b]

What software did you use to write the bootable CD? It is possible that the ASUS does not recongnize that format and thus cannot read it properly. Just a shot in the dark. I'd also try it as master on IDE 2 when you want to boot from it.

 

[xynder]

Why not just boot off the windows disk?

 

[Prasanta]

Thanks to all for reply. I have tried all possible combinations putting the CD RW in IDE 1 and then in IDE 2 using it both as Primary and Slave. My BIOS detects the drive correctly, Win-XP detects this correctly, but whenever I put a disk in it and try to read, Win is giving message "Device not Ready". I have used both Win-XP built in feature and also Nero 5.5, software supplied with the CD RW.

Regards,
Prasanta.

 

[Buz2b]

Just for clarification, have you tried just using one CD drive at a time? Unplug and remove from the BIOS one of the drives, then boot and see if it works properly and can be read. It would be good to narrow it down to just the CD or the CDRW.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

According to the help files for Nero 5.5.x "Bootable CDs may be created only under Windows 95/98or NT." so it won't work with XP. As to XP's burn feature, I don't think it provides the bootable CD function and even if you copy a bootable floppy to CD it won't work because there's a hidden file needed which Easy CD creator points out and has you add when making a boot disk. I haven't tried it with Nero because as has been suggested to you, I boot from the XP CD 😉

 

[Prasanta]

I should have made it clear in my initial post itself. I have only one CD-RW in my system I borrowed a friend's CDR to install Win-XP. Do I need to use another CDR ? Can't I use CD-RW for both reading and writing ?

Prasanta.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: Prasanta
I should have made it clear in my initial post itself. I have only one CD-RW in my system I borrowed a friend's CDR to install Win-XP. Do I need to use another CDR ? Can't I use CD-RW for both reading and writing ?

Prasanta.

If you have a CD-RW you don't need another drive, you can do installs and everything else except DVD stuff with an CD-RW drive.