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System Won't POST after SATA HD install

D

dev0lution

Senior member
I installed another 80GB WD SATA drive that had windows MCE on it from another system, with the intention of reformatting it and using it for storage. I installed the drive and made sure that my system's drive was 1st in the boot priority in BIOS, since I didn't want it booting from the new drive.

System hung at "Primary Channel Not Found, Secondary Channel Not Found". Removed the new drive from the equation and same problem. I've even tried putting the CD-ROM 1st in the boot order and trying to boot from a Symantec Ghost Recovery CD or a Windows XP Pro CD. No dice.

Some Notes:

HW setup is the "Home" profile in signature

All my HDD's and opticals appear to be working and are visible in the BIOS.

Not USING RAID.

Mobo Battery appears to be dead

Voltages in the BIOS are showing a bit off i.e. 3.3 showing 3.23

Any ideas? I'm thinking the board may have gone bad....
 
First as you said mobo battery is dead .. replace it & let it reset bios to defaults, unless you know what all your prior settings were

Second, Do you have SATA Drivers installed in the new computer ? ... if you do not, you cannnot access the drive

Third, you can't just put the new drive as Primary and expect the pc to boot .. there will be hardware incompatibliites and you
would need to boot from the Windows cd and do a repair install to fix them

Best way is simply put your new hard drive as a secondary drive on eitther the IDE controller (if drive supports it) or on the
secondary SATA controller cable after the SATA drivers are installed
 
Originally posted by: bruceb

Do you have SATA Drivers installed in the new computer ? ... if you do not, you cannnot access the drive

Third, you can't just put the new drive as Primary and expect the pc to boot .. there will be hardware incompatibliites and you
would need to boot from the Windows cd and do a repair install to fix them
Click to expand...

Yes, the computer in question has been using SATA drives since it was built so this wouldn't be the issue.

And the new drive wasn't being used as Primary, in the OP I mentioned I set the boot order to continue using the drive that was already my boot drive.

And I would boot from the Windows cd if I could, but even when CDROM is the primary boot device and the windows cd is in the drive it won't boot past the logo screen.
 
For those who might run into something similar:

Turns out it was the SATA/Firewire/USB combo card. I'd been using 2 SATA drives on my mobo's SATA3 and SATA4 channels. When I added the 3rd drive I redid the cabling and put both disks that were bootable on SATA1 and SATA2 which happened to be conflicting with the SATA controller on the add-in card. So after pulling all cards besides my VGA, the system booted up no problem. Now I just have to figure out how to put the card back in without conflicts.

And is it just me or is MCE 2005 an obviously OEM product? They didn't even update the installer notes and the updates require workarounds (rollup 2 won't work on anything but .net 1.1 sp1? wtf?) are documented in a generally half-@$$ fashion.
 
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