uh oh! computer wont boot...new HDD, still nothing! annoying beeps and messages..

[MrDudeMan]

i am helping someone with their computer. i went to look at it and just assumed a hard drive failure since it had all the normal signs. well, it was a SCSI 10k atlas u160 18.4gb ultra3, and nothing was connected to the IDE1 port and 2 cd-roms to IDE2. i didnt notice until a little after nothing worked that only 1 cd-rom works...but anyways, thats another problem.


the main problem is (and this didnt change a thing with the new drive) the computer boots up and tries to load the OS and says "strike f1 to retry boot or f2 to enter setup"

well on the old drive i hit f1, popped the message up again. put the new drive in, went to setup, it only finds it on the secondary IDE channel. wont find anything at all on primary. so basically it will detect a hard drive, but wont boot to it. wtf?

its an old dell with a daughtboard looking thing hanging off the side of the motherboard and all it has on it is a PCI modem. the old SCSI controller used to be on it but it isnt doing anything different with that off. i dont know what to do.



also, they said nothing changed, this just happened.

 

[mechBgon]

Look through the BIOS for a boot-selection menu, if you didn't already.

 

[Slammy1]

I don't know if this has any relevence to your problem, but I do have a story. When I first set up my SCSI tree I, I installed from my primary IDE drive. All I had was an upgrade version of Win2k. So, I tried disconnecting the drive and I got a "Missing NTLDR" error and a hard stop.

So, i tried image copying from my IDE1 to my SCSI drive. I used drive image, and the particular verion I had has an issue with the boot sector in Win2k. Wish I could remember more of the specifics, but what it did was rearrange the drive sequence. This in turn left a pointer to the wrong disk and a big crash. The solution is a file PQ has to rewrite the boot sector. Yup, that would've been the way to fix it alright. What I did was to do an over install of Win2k which really messed things up.

No problem, I had my system files and docs recent on my IDE, and I just copied them over. I decided to keep the IDE drive as a fail safe drive and a backup for system files. That was the plan, but I became heady with the idea of 1,000,000 MTBF and just forgot updating my backups. So when my primary SCSI drive died I lost over a year's worth of stuff. I don't know if any of that helps, but it seems similar in issue if not substance. Also, make sure your termination is correct and each drive has a unique ID, but you've already done that I'm sure.

 

[MrDudeMan]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Look through the BIOS for a boot-selection menu, if you didn't already.

tried that. wont see either drive, scsi or IDE.



maybe i didnt convey the problem clearly...i dont think the kind of drive it is using even matters at this point. it isnt even trying to see it. i gets to a point where you would think its gonna start to boot, but it just goes strike f1 to retry or f2 to enter setup, and nothing in there seems to help.


wtf?

 

[thorin]

Replace or swap cables.

Thorin

 

[MrDudeMan]

did that also...