Hello,
I am getting a message on boot "Detecting IDE drives ..." that always comes up. It stays that way for about a minute. Normally, I see the message for about a second before it finds my hardware. However, now my system is no longer detecting either one of my hard drives. The funny thing is, and I know this is "always" the case, I did nothing to my system between when it was working perfectly and when it would not boot.
I am running an Athlon 1.4 on the ABIT KG7-Lite. The system simply refuses to believe that I have hard drives. Both went at once which make it impossible for me to believe that they are the cause of the problem. I have changed the ribbon cable for another one I had (except the one I just put in was an ATA33 cable, and my two drives are ATA66 and ATA100). No change. I tried all sorts of BIOS settings, including letting the BIOS try to detect the drives in Softmenu III. It cannot. I have reset the BIOS to default settings and it still cannot detect drives. I have checked to make sure I have the latest BIOS (4B dated July 27th, 2001). I have. I also made sure the ribbon cable was in correctly, and pushed in all the way on the drives and the motherboard. I have no idea what to do now.
I have 3 OS's installed, WindowsME, 2K, and XP PRO. Both ME and 2K have been installed for a long time, and XP for about a month. The system was working perfectly in 2K and XP. I had never bothered to reinstall ME once I changed the motherboard 2 months ago since I pretty well only use 2K. All three appeared on the boot menu.
The system worked fine up until I turned it on today. Yesterday was a perfectly normal day trying out features of XP. I shut the system down (no problems) and tried to boot today. Up until today, I had not had any problems at all. The cover was always on my machine, and no one else uses it but me.
The next thing to try is I am going to put my old motherboard back in with my old CPU (Abit BH6 and Celeron 550) to verify that the hard drives and ribbon cable are OK. My system is not even hooked up to the Internet since I had an old ISA modem and have ADSL on order. The KG7 does not have an ISA slot so I have not been able to use a modem. Since I have put the new motherboard on (2 months ago), it has never hooked up to the Internet so a virus is extremely unlikely.
Just to make this problem even more bizarre, I had to move both CD drives (burner and DVD) down to their lowest bays, and move the hard drives up to their highest bays so that I could try different configurations on the ribbon cable. I made the hard drives masters, and both CD drives slaves. I hooked one hard drive to one CD drive, and the other HD to the CD-burner. It was a total pain because the ribbon cables had to cross and they just barely reached. I had to remove my A: disk drive from the system to make them fit. Now it looks like this :
CD2
CD1
HD2
HD1
And all four devices were detected by the BIOS! The only problem now is that none of the OS's will boot because they can't find the basic hardware. I can change the boot.ini file in order to get the system to boot, but I don't want to leave my system the way it is. The ribbon cables are stretched to their maximum (not good), and because the only way to get them to fit was to connect CD2 to HD2 and CD1 to HD1 as per the diagram above, they had to cross over each other which kind of bent them in the middle (not good either). I just put all the hardware back the way it was before, and I am back to square one. If the hard drives are together, neither is detected. I have had the second hard drive since April and it has always been slave to the master HD. Why would it suddenly decide it can't be on the same ribbon cable after working perfectly for 6 months? Did I play Gladiotor too many times on my DVD player and it got some ideas about not being a slave anymore? (lame joke, but I worked on this all night, I'm exhausted).
Any suggestions?
Here is my system :
Athlon 1.4 (133)
Abit KG7-Lite
512 MB DDR RAM
ATI Rage Fury
19 GB Quantum Fireball
40 GB Quantum Fireball
Real Magic Hollywood Plus (DVD accelerator)
Soundblaster Live Player 1024
Logitech Cordless desktop
PCI network card
Thanks,
Rooster
I am getting a message on boot "Detecting IDE drives ..." that always comes up. It stays that way for about a minute. Normally, I see the message for about a second before it finds my hardware. However, now my system is no longer detecting either one of my hard drives. The funny thing is, and I know this is "always" the case, I did nothing to my system between when it was working perfectly and when it would not boot.
I am running an Athlon 1.4 on the ABIT KG7-Lite. The system simply refuses to believe that I have hard drives. Both went at once which make it impossible for me to believe that they are the cause of the problem. I have changed the ribbon cable for another one I had (except the one I just put in was an ATA33 cable, and my two drives are ATA66 and ATA100). No change. I tried all sorts of BIOS settings, including letting the BIOS try to detect the drives in Softmenu III. It cannot. I have reset the BIOS to default settings and it still cannot detect drives. I have checked to make sure I have the latest BIOS (4B dated July 27th, 2001). I have. I also made sure the ribbon cable was in correctly, and pushed in all the way on the drives and the motherboard. I have no idea what to do now.
I have 3 OS's installed, WindowsME, 2K, and XP PRO. Both ME and 2K have been installed for a long time, and XP for about a month. The system was working perfectly in 2K and XP. I had never bothered to reinstall ME once I changed the motherboard 2 months ago since I pretty well only use 2K. All three appeared on the boot menu.
The system worked fine up until I turned it on today. Yesterday was a perfectly normal day trying out features of XP. I shut the system down (no problems) and tried to boot today. Up until today, I had not had any problems at all. The cover was always on my machine, and no one else uses it but me.
The next thing to try is I am going to put my old motherboard back in with my old CPU (Abit BH6 and Celeron 550) to verify that the hard drives and ribbon cable are OK. My system is not even hooked up to the Internet since I had an old ISA modem and have ADSL on order. The KG7 does not have an ISA slot so I have not been able to use a modem. Since I have put the new motherboard on (2 months ago), it has never hooked up to the Internet so a virus is extremely unlikely.
Just to make this problem even more bizarre, I had to move both CD drives (burner and DVD) down to their lowest bays, and move the hard drives up to their highest bays so that I could try different configurations on the ribbon cable. I made the hard drives masters, and both CD drives slaves. I hooked one hard drive to one CD drive, and the other HD to the CD-burner. It was a total pain because the ribbon cables had to cross and they just barely reached. I had to remove my A: disk drive from the system to make them fit. Now it looks like this :
CD2
CD1
HD2
HD1
And all four devices were detected by the BIOS! The only problem now is that none of the OS's will boot because they can't find the basic hardware. I can change the boot.ini file in order to get the system to boot, but I don't want to leave my system the way it is. The ribbon cables are stretched to their maximum (not good), and because the only way to get them to fit was to connect CD2 to HD2 and CD1 to HD1 as per the diagram above, they had to cross over each other which kind of bent them in the middle (not good either). I just put all the hardware back the way it was before, and I am back to square one. If the hard drives are together, neither is detected. I have had the second hard drive since April and it has always been slave to the master HD. Why would it suddenly decide it can't be on the same ribbon cable after working perfectly for 6 months? Did I play Gladiotor too many times on my DVD player and it got some ideas about not being a slave anymore? (lame joke, but I worked on this all night, I'm exhausted).
Any suggestions?
Here is my system :
Athlon 1.4 (133)
Abit KG7-Lite
512 MB DDR RAM
ATI Rage Fury
19 GB Quantum Fireball
40 GB Quantum Fireball
Real Magic Hollywood Plus (DVD accelerator)
Soundblaster Live Player 1024
Logitech Cordless desktop
PCI network card
Thanks,
Rooster
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