I have an old Gateway PC I gave to my kids to use. Comcast's free McAfee bogs it down so much, the system is almost unusable and has become unstable over the years.
I decided to put in a new mobo, cpu, and memory (and had to put in a new power suppy). Mobo is a Gigabyte GA-8VM800M-775, cpu is an Intel Pentium D 805, and I've got 2x1G of OCZ PC3200 ram. One 160G HD, one 30G HD, a DVD burner and a CD player.Gigabyte cooler, lots of extra fans, tower case...
I saved all important files to a USB drive and was ready to wipe everything on the HD's. I set the boot order in the BIOS to CD/DVD, HDD, then Floppy, re-installed Windows XP SP2 and when prompted, I told it to reformat the HD. The 160G was ID0 and the 30G was ID1 (although the 30G still had an old boot partition), so I presumed that the 160 would be formatted and the OS would go on there. Everything went flawlessly, until I realised, after even setting up the network and creating logins for the whole family, that the 30G drive was nowhere to be found in My Computer. It was there in the Device Manager, but not in My Computer.
I tried powering down, disconnecting the 30G drive, and rebooting, but it wouldn't boot. I powered down, reconnected the 30 and disconnected the 160, but it still wouldn't boot. It's not set up for RAID, but it seemed like part of the OS was on each of the two drives.
I disconnected the 30G and reinstalled the xp pro, this time only doing a "quick format." All seemed to be going well, except that when I finally got everything loaded and the OS showed me the admin login and prompted me for a password, the keyboard was unresponsive (MS Natural PS2 keyboard). For hours I tried a dozen different things (I would start in safe mode, my kbd worked, but if in normal mode, it wouldn't... looking in Device Manager, had a ! on the kbd and ? on the Audio and Video cards) but kept going around in circles.
Eventually, I got everything working, but now the system will not boot unless I have the XP disk in the CD/DVD drive. If I leave it out, after 30 sec of looking at the "IDE Devices Listing..." the system displays
Boot from CD/DVD :
Boot from CD/DVD :
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.
I even cleared the CMOS on the mobo by shorting the CLR_CMOS pins together, but still it prompts me to put in the OS disk near the end of the BIOS.
How do I fix this problem? I've spent two days, 8 hours each, working on this PC and I'm fed up. Please help!
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IDE. There are two SATA ports, but these are both IDE drives... on the same controller.
I will double-check the boot order tomorrow morning (the PC in question is downstairs and I'm on the PC upstairs that still works), but I'm 99% sure I have it: Floppy, HD, CD/DVD. However, boot order shouldn't matter if there's no disk in the drive. If it doesn't find a disk in the drive, it should skip the CD/DVD drive and try booting from the HD... but it doesn't.
Sounds like the problem is with the installation of Windows - Best I can think is that the OS is relying on the CD for the HDD Drivers.
I would go with setting up the hard drives as you prefer ( Just install one drive for the initial installation of windows ).
Format the drive completely - Make sure you install Service pack 1 as soon as you boot windows for the first time ( After installing any required hardware drivers - SP1 is required for XP to recognize drives over 100GB )
and then install the second hard drive as a slave. format and reboot.
A long, long time ago, I installed the mobo drivers, but they've been clobbered since then, because I reloaded the OS at least four more times, two or three with reformatting.
The reason that I haven't done the standard, "format HD, load OS, load drivers that came with mobo" sequence is that after I did that the first time, it would only boot in safe mode. I knew that meant a bad driver (or more), so I've been selectively installing drivers rather than just sticking the Gigabyte CD in the drive and installing the 6 or 7 drivers that came with it.
What I'll do is this:
Reformat the HDD completely again and install XP (it already has SP1 and SP2, webwolf),
burn a CD on this PC (the one I'm typing on) of all the latest drivers from the Gigabyte website
(I know it already has the latest version of the BIOS, F9),
install the latest version of each driver, starting with the mobo/chipset, individually.
How does that sound? Or do you think that I should load them all from the Gigabyte CD and then try to repair the ones that are wrong? Will the bad drivers always give me a "!" or a "?" icon in the Device Manager? What I mean is, can I have a bad driver on the system that doesn't have a "!" or "?" in the Device Manager list?
Thanks. I can see that, as usual, several of you are leading me in the right direction with portions of the answer. I"m glad they simplified the splitting of points here at experts-exchange. I wish I had posted after only four hours of problems, but I build PC's only once every two years and I get rusty. It took me more than a day to be able to characterize what was happening so I could post a sensible question.
Thanks again... I'll report back in an hour or two when I get all that done.
Al.
The drivers could be bad without displaying that the device is faulty - It would simply cause the OS to become unstable.
I wouldnt bother with the CD drivers - CD's can become corrupt over time ( Ive had a couple of driver discs that suddenly started giving bad installs after a few uses, cheap thin foil heats up too much and damages the data ). Download the latest drivers and burn a new disc.
other than that, I think you probably nailed it.
Well... complete failure.
I essentially started over. I deleted the one partition on the 160G drive and created a new one. Then, I installed XP Pro SP2 from the disk, selecting Format (not quick format). I then burned a CD with the drivers for the mobo (a high-quality CD, Taiyo Yuden, and verified that it was a good copy). I took that CD down to the PC and installed the mobo/chipset drivers, the onboard video, onboard audio, and onboard LAN drivers. I then rebooted the PC and got the exact same thing: the BIOS runs, I get to the PCI Device Listing screen, then there's a 10 or 20 second pause then
Boot from CD/DVD:
Boot from CD/DVD:
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.
Now, I presumed that it's the mobo, so I went and got another mobo (I bought two) and move everything over to the new one. I pressed the power button momentarily and the PC came up immediately. 10 seconds later, it powered down. I pressed the power again momentarily. Nothing. I pressed it for 10 seconds, released, then pressed again for 10 seconds, released and it powered up. 10 seconds later, it powered down. I then pressed for 10 seconds twice again and it came up and continued through the whole BIOS, then displayed the PCI Device Listing, then 10 or 20 seconds of nothing, followed by:
Boot from CD/DVD:
Boot from CD/DVD:
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.
So, I've printed out a listing of the XP Recovery Console commands and I'm going to try what nobus suggested. If that fails, I'll try the 30G drive, but I don't have much hope for that solution.
I've got to do some stuff with the kids now, so it may be tonight before you hear back from me.
Say... one thing is bugging me.
I'm trying to avoid having to install SP1 and SP2, so I'm using an XP Pro SP2 Upgrade disk from this computer that I'm typing on right now. However, when the time comes to enter the KEY, I'm using the XP Pro Upgrade disk KEY from my kids' PC (so, I'm using the proper key for the machine, but I"m using a different disk for the loading, to avoid having to install a million updates). Could that be the cause of my problems?
Does microsoft have SP1 and SP2 packaged into one upgrade that I can download, or do I have to have do each of the little upgrades individually?
If I do have to load the kids' original XP Pro (pre SP1), I presume I should make only a 100G partition onto which I would load the OS (actually, I'd probably create only a 30G partition for the OS and apps and later make a 130G partition for all our user files), right?
Thanks.
Al.
Sp2 has its own issues as well ( in my experience ) I had to install SP1 followed by required drivers and then SP2 - essentially the only issue I had was that SP1 was required for USB 2 and HDD's over 100GB ( Roughly ).
a straight SP2 install caused havoc with my Bluetooth device, Not even sure that ever get fixed.
I doubt it's the issue in this case, but I would give it a go if your 30GB drive fails - worth a try.
Just make a SP1 slipstreamed disc and install that.
It shouldn't require the HD to be the first in the boot order. Traditionally, the floppy was the first in the boot order and the system would try to boot from that first. Then, when that failed (you were never supposed to leave a floppy in the drive a boot, remember?) it would go to the second in line and that was the HD. I can change the boot order in the BIOS back and forth when I need to boot from something other than the HD, but I shouldn't have to.
That's an easy fix, so I'll try that, but I don't think it's the problem. Could be the hard disk, but I'm leaning towards it being the fact that I'm using the wrong release's KEY. That should be an easy test too.
I will check to see if the HD is set as Master also.
Thanks.
Al.
Well, more bad news...
I checked the boot order and it was as I had expected: floppy, HD, CD/DVD.
I also checked to make sure that the one HD I had attached to the motherboard was indeed on ID0 and had its jumpers set to Master. Yes and Yes. The 30G, which was disconnected, had its jumpers set to Slave, by the way.
The first thing I tried was to do a FIXMBR from the Recovery Console.
The Recovery Console responded to this command by giving the expected warnings, but I pressed on and then it reported something like "This disk has a corrupted or illegal Master Boot Record" and asked me if I wanted to fix it. I responded "y" and it proceeded to fix it. I removed the XP Pro disk and rebooted and, of course:
Boot from CD/DVD :
Boot from CD/DVD :
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.
The next thing I tried was using the correct XP Pro disk for this PC. It turns out it is an SP1 disk, so I went ahead and reformatted the 160G as a single partition and installed XP Pro on it from the SP1 disk, and entered the proper KEY (the one I had been using with the SP2 disk).
None of this did a lick of good. After everything came up, including creating logins for the whole family, I removed the XP Pro SP1 disk and rebooted. As usual:
Boot from CD/DVD :
Boot from CD/DVD :
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.
So, it must be the 160G drive.
The 30G drive has some important files on it and it's 10 years old, so I don't really want to reformat it nor do I really want to trust a disk that old with my OS. So, it's off to the store tomorrow, whichever has the best deal on HD's to buy one.
I suspect that an IDE drive would be cheaper than a SATA, but I don't expect there should be any problem with booting from the SATA. I'm not sure that I really want to trust that 160G either, although it's only about 3 years old. The system has been hard to boot for the last few months... frequently you have to reboot two or three times to get past a freeze. So, maybe this drive is starting to break down. It's a Western Digital, which I know many swear by, although it's my first. All else being equal, I usually buy Maxtor HD's because I've got about a half dozen of them whirring in my many systems and I've never had one go bad. I only get the ones with 3-year or 5-year warranties.
Maybe I can put the 160G drive on as a second HD, but I want to verify that it's not flaking out on me. I know that the MSDOS "CHKDSK" doesn't work with XP anymore... what's the XP replacement?
I'll pick up a drive over the next few days and report back.
Thanks.
Al.
Download the UBCD http://www.ultimatebootcd.
You'll find memory testers and hard disk testers on it. Use the hard disk tester on your drive.
You'll also find utils on the disk to nuke the drive - wipe it. Use those as well in case there are corrupt MBRs, FATs, partition tables, boot loaders or whatever.
Western Digital in my experience arent great in longevity terms, It's a very generic model and used by a lot of vendors ( Again only in my experience ).
Ive had a 300GB Maxtor on a USB 2 external Caddy, works like a dream with no issiues - coming up on a year old, previously I went through 3 Western Digitial External hard drives lasting roughly a year a piece ( Hammered drive ).
chkdsk does work in XP, it just fails over when the OS is live and reports false positives, installing the recovery console as a boot option does the trick, but as mentioned above, A seperate bootable Disc such as "himens boot cd pro" is a very useful set of tools for debugging all sorts of issues from ram to hdd issues.
can you try to install another XP copy? or even a win98 or win2000 for testing?
it seems strange that you can install without problems , but it does not boot.
it does NOT give any error during the install?
you can also disconnect everything not needed during the install : extra disks, cards, readers, etc..
There are no errors during installation.
I have tried installing from two different XP Pro disks and both act the same.
I have a question in to Gigabyte. There's a footnote I recently noticed in the manual for the GA-8VM800M-775 motherboard. It says something like "a SATA boot drive is strongly recommended." I've asked them whether my problems could be because I'm trying to boot from a PATA drive.
If they recommend SATA, there are a few on sale right now and I wouldn't mind increasing the disk space on that machine anyway. 30G is barely a decent size for a swap drive these days!
Let's see what Gigabyte says.
Thanks.
Al.
Over 48 hours and still no answer from Gigabyte tech support. Harumph (not my first choice of sentence enhancers, but this is a family website, right?). I even wrote to sales and suggested I buy Asus in the future and got a story about how Monday was a holiday... well, my question was sent Monday NIGHT, so their staff has had all day Tuesday and all day Wednesday to answer my question.
Oh, by the way, regarding not booting from PATA, I think the issue might be similar to the three-day problem I had with an Asus P4B533-E. The primary controller was an ATA66 and ran off the chipset. The secondary controller ran off a Promise chip, did ATA100, and supported RAID 0, 1, and maybe one more mode. Eventually, I found out from Asus tech support, that to boot from the secondary controller, I needed to set the BIOS to "boot from SCSI," even though my disk was an ATA100. To their engineers' twisted minds, booting from anything other than the chipset controller meant an alternate boot drive, most likely SCSI, and thus they named the mode "boot from SCSI." Duh!
I fear that I might be having the same problem. This board has two SATA ports and two IDE ports. I"ll bet that the SATA are considered the primary controller and the EIDE the secondary. Maybe there's a "boot from SCSI" mode I need to set in the BIOS or maybe I'll be forced to use a SATA drive for boot. In this day and age, I don't blame mobo designers presuming we're booting from SATA, but at least put something about setting up booting from PATA in the manual.
here the manual : http://europe.giga-byte.co
i suppose the ide disk is listed in the Standard cmos features ?
what are the choices in boot priority? (can't seen them in the manual)
i suppose also that the onchip ide channels are enabled in Integrated periherals
How is the sata mode set ?
did you try the failsafe default setting ?
** that's about all i could find
I finally, after more than 48 hours (NOT including the Memorial Day holiday), got a reply from Gigabyte. They said that if I'm using a Western Digital HD, to remove all jumpers. They said to take off all other HD's (which I already had done) and to then reload the OS.
I simply removed the jumper that selected "Master" and that fixed the problem.
I do still have a possible problem and wouldn't mind your help with that.
It's late and so I'll just post what I wrote to Gigabyte:
I removed the jumper off the 160G Western Digital drive, pressed the power button momentarily, and it powered up. 2 seconds later, it powered itself down. I tried pressing the power button again momentarily and it did nothing. I then held the power button for 10 seconds, released it, then pressed it again for 10 seconds and upon releasing it, the system booted. It booted from the 160G Western Digital drive, WITHOUT an XP disk in the optical drive. I did not have to reload the OS. I logged in and started browsing the web (one of the few applications installed). After 10 minutes, in the middle of sending an ebay message, the system powered itself down. No error messages, no warnings, just a black screen and all the fans and HD's shut off. I then had to hold the power button for 10 seconds twice to get it to power up. I then got back on the Web and browsed for 30 minutes with no problems. I've left the PC powered up overnight to make sure that it doesn't shut itself off during the night.
Clearly removing the jumper (which set the drive to Master) fixed the problem.
1. Why isn't this in the installation manual?
2. Why is there no FAQ for this issue?
3. Why did my system first go down after 2 sec and then again after 10 min? It's not heat... I have a massive aluminum Gigabyte CPU cooler, and two 140mm fans in the case. I do only have a 300-watt power supply, but I only have the motherboard, cooler, two fans, and two hard drives running at the time (the 30G hard drive's IDE cable is currently disconnected). I've run the PC for an hour before and when I've looked at the CPU temperature via the BIOS, it's always been either 28C or 29C, the coolest of all my PC's. I do not have the CPU overclocked.
What say ye, experts-exchange?
Al.
Sounds like it could be a PSU issue, I dont like the power button one bit.
Ive only had a marginal PSU once, and the system went haywire, It didnt just switch off, But I guess all systems will react differently. Check to make sure that power button isnt faulty in itself too if possible make sure the wires arent loose on the power button and PSU, just reseat everything to make sure nothings worked loose while youve been swapping around the hdd's.
for the WHY Q's - you should ask the manufacturer...
as for the pwr issue, i suggest to try another power supply, can be a case of bas caps : www.badcaps.net
also, you should know that many Capacitors show aging problelms, resulting in lower capacity, and higher resistance. in short , this results in a lower max power output, eg, a 300 W unit only outputting 200-250 W
you can calculate the power you need here, before buying a new one - and allow for a margin !
http://web.aanet.com.au/Sn
The PSU is only 1 week old. My old PSU didn't have the little 12V 4-pin connector, so I had to get a new one. I think the old one was only 270W.
I don't think it's the connections to the mobo because it's very consistent. After an abnormal powerdown, I can press the power button a dozen times for 1, 2, or 3 seconds and it will do nothing, but then if I do two presses where I hold it for 10 seconds, the system powers up on the second release. It's not intermittent... very consistent. I think it's a feature.
It did run all night without a powerdown, so I'm certain it's not time-dependent. It's hard to judge if it's CPU temp yet, because we know the CPU heats up from "computation" and doesn't generate much heat at idle.
I would like to report that my boot time is 20 seconds and my shutdown is 5 seconds. I'm going to video tape this before and after I install McAfee virus scanning and put the resulting videos on You Tube. My intent is to shame McAfee into re-coding their cycle-hog code. I used CA's antivirus before I got Comcast and their free McAfee. CA didn't bog down even my ancient 700MHz Athlon, whereas McAfee made it unusable.
Fear not... even though none of you proposed a solution to my problem, I will not ask for my points back... I'll distribute them by helpfulness. I'll close this out when I get an answer (or non-answer) from Gigabyte regarding the unexpected powerdowns and award points. Nobus... please post that the real solution to the boot problem was removing the Western Digital jumper and I'll make that the primary solution. I'll split the points between that and other helpful posts.
Thanks everyone.
Al.
Thanks.
Just as I expected. This is the problem with building your own PC's. When something goes wrong and you blame one vendor, they push the blame on another.
Gigabyte says that the jumper problem is a bug in the WD disk drive and not in the mobo, to which I responded, "... then why has it run flawlessly for two years on an Intel mobo with the jumper installed?"
Furthermore, as I expected, they blamed the 300W PSU for the unexpected powerdowns and said to install a 350W. Sure, I'll just pull this 350W PSU out of my b....ackpocket and install it. I don't feel like selling a perfectly new 300W PSU on ebay for half of what I paid for it to get a 350W PSU. If the thing keeps shutting down, which it hasn't done since those first two boots (not on the last three, the final boot now running 24 hours), I'll guess I'll have to get a new PSU, I suppose.
Meanwhile, the system is running fine. I'll post a pointer to my YouTube post once I videotape my "Shame McAfee into better code" video. I wish I could retain the 20 second boot and 5 second shutdown, but the computer is not much fun if you just use it to warm the room.
Thanks everyone.
Al.
I videotaped boot, startup of IE, and shutdown before and after installing McAfee.
Boot took 20 seconds, IE startup took 2 seconds, and shutdown took 5 seconds, BOTH before and AFTER installing McAfee. So, either they cleaned up their act or there's so much computing power in a dual core 2.66GHz CPU, that McAfee doesn't cause noticeable load.
It will probably be Tuesday or Wednesday before Gigabyte gets back to me on the power supply question, but I'll post the results here.
I've had no more mysterious shutdowns and the powerups all have only required momentary presses of the power button.
Thanks.
Al.
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by: dbruntonPosted on 2008-05-25 at 22:29:48ID: 21644752
Is the hard disk SATA or IDE? (I think it's IDE from your description but I need to confirm this)
Check your BIOS to see that it can boot from IDE and not SATA - also check the boot order.