PC Keeps Forgetting Where to boot from!! SOS SOS SOS

[sansoora]

Dear Friends

I have just bought the following spec:

2000XP, MSI KT333 Ultra 2 Motherboard, GeForce 4200 Ti 128MB, 1GB of DDR 2100, IDE1 - Primary Master: MDT 20 Gig HDD, Primary Slave: WDC 40gig, Secondary Master: Aopen CDRW. 400 Watt Power suppply, Hansol 2100A Monitor, D-Link Network Card, Diamond Supra 56K Modem.

I set the system up got XP installed and everything worked fine. However, I woke in the morning to find that on booting the PC couldn't find a bootable Hard Disk - however all of the drives were being correctly identified in bios. I powered off and fiddled with the jumpers on the Hard Drives to ensure they were set up as Slave/Master - After making sure bios was on defaults - it booted. I saved all the bios settings, this morning I find the same problem again!!!

Any ideas - Thanks a million in advance!

 

[Noid]

A damaged boot sector will cause this problem. I had to use a new MAxtor 60gig drive as a backup drive after that happened.
I dont know of any fix. If its under warranty return it.

I asked the same question here a while ago .. and got no response. If you leave the OS system disk in the CD ,,, you can still boot... but that gets old real quik.

 

[Calin]

Normally the PC would start from the master disk on primary partition. It is that disk that you are booting from (20 GB disk?)
How can you find what drive the operating system resides on? Any default installation will be made on primary master.
You can see c:\boot.ini, and there is a line like "default=multi(0)disk(0)...
disk(0) = primary master
If the system won't start, read the BIOS settings. Normally boot order must be primary master, ... (or C, ... or HDD-0, ...)
I saw once a problem (1 GB Western Digital) when the hard drive did not initialize himself in proper time. Only solution was to set the bootup to "slow" (memory count thrice). Even if it isn't probable, it could be a solution

 

[LiLithTecH]

Did you install the Promise PDC20276 ATA133 RAID drivers?
(you need to install them whether you use it or not)

Check the Event Viewer for clues.
Check the Device Manager to see if there are any devices errored.

 

[sansoora]

Dear Friends

I'd like to first thank you guys for your valuable expert advise - What would I do without all this pooled knowledge??! I have an update - The motherboard is non-raid for a start. I stuck in my old WD 40 gig HDD and the system recognised it perfectly - installed windows no hassle and am on it now! I think that it must have been a faulty hard disk, and brand new as well! I thought I'd never heard of this MDT company - someone tells me that it could be a WD OEM Disk - I don't know!?

Thanks Again Folks - you are the best!

San

 

[compudog]

MDT seems to be re-badged Western Digital drives. At least the few I found on the web site showed WD part numbers. Never heard of them until now.