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Won't boot from Hard drive

B

Bobthedino

Junior Member
I just recently built a new computer. Everything seems to be working fine, video works, computer boots to BIOS. Bios recognized the HD properly and the CD drive. I booted up to a windows CD, installed Windows, it also recognized the HD and formatted it and installed on it, but when i go to reboot, it just hangs at the HD drive part of the boot process. I changed the boot order so the HD was first, and I waited a few minutes to see if the computer just needed some time to start up the drive, but it just keeps hanging there.

Anyone have any idea what my problem could be?
 
Originally posted by: Harvey
Did you set the active partition on your hard drive?
Click to expand...

Windows XP/2000 will automatically set the boot partition to active during the install....assuming it formatted the drive.

Is this an IDE or a PATA hard drive?
 
If you have only one hard drive, it should have happened during the setup.

Is the drive connected to your primary IDE channel, and is jumper on the drive set correctly? If it's set to Cable Select, make sure you're on the connector at the end, not the first one on the cable.

As a test, you can set the jumper to Master, and the position won't matter.

Another problem could be if your CD-ROM drive is on the same IDE channel, especially if it's also set as master.

Try disconnecting all IDE drives, except for the hard drive. If that works, add your other drives one at a time and be sure they're on the right IDE channel.
 
It is an IDE hard drive.

I already had set the HD to master and put the CD drive and HD on different cables, and fromw hat I can tell ont he BIOS they are on different channels.
 
And I just caught it on the boot up to get back in to BIOS, it detects it during the inital tests. The checked the motherboard's homepage for tech support, but the stuff it listed as needing to be changed on the BIOS, my BIOS doesn't have. Perhaps I need to upgrade my version of BIOS?

EDIT: Even though BIOS detects it and Windows can format on it and install on it, could it be a problem with the harddrive? I installed the HD from other desktop on it just for kicks and it loaded past the boot screen. It couldn't go further than the Windows loading screen because of the massive hardware differences, but it did get past loading.
 
If nothing else works, you could try re-installing Windows from the ground up. If you want to test the bad drive theory, try it on another drive.
 
Do you mean take another drive, format it and install, then see if it can boot?

I already re-installed windows on the new HD twice, and it still won't boot.

The other HD that has all my stuff on it will boot up on the new computer, just not all the way, it doesn't like the new hardware, but it can at least get past the initial boot. I installed the new harddrive on the old comp and it is tellimg me to "Remove disks or other media. Press any key to restart".

EDIT: I wanted to make sure it was trying to boot as well, so I changed the settings to make the CD boot first, it tried to boot that, failed, then moved on to the HD and hung again. That's for the new harddrive in the new computer.

EDIT X2: Also, thank you everyone for trying to help me out.
 
I think that I am going to return the HD and get a new one. I've tried basically everything from everyone's site, and nothing so far. I'm thinking now the HD is just messed up somehow. Thanks for the help everyone.
 
200 GB. I already experienced the problem of it only reading at 137 GB, and downloaded and installed drivers to correct the issue. When it wouldn't boot I wondered if it was the change int he BIOS that occured because of the drivers, so I reset the bios, it read 137 GB again, but it still wouldn't boot.
 
Well, I removed the hard drive and booted up, it went past the HD boot because it was not there and then tried to boot from CD. Would anyone theorize it could be a problem with the Windows installation and not the HD itself that is causing the machine to hang on the HD boot?
 
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