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!
Start Free Trial
