I am working on my mother-in-law's PC which quit working for her. When booting up, it goes through the initial POST, including the RAM check, but stops at a line stating "Found CD-Rom". The hard drive was very noisy, so I assumed it was a bad hard drive, so I replaced it. That stopped the noise, but the PC still stops at the same point during the POST. I then assumed that maybe it needed formatting, so I put in a boot disk to start the formatting process--it still stops at the same place without accessing the floppy drive. So I then went into the BIOS and changed the boot sequence so the floppy would be the first drive accessed--still no change. I then put in the Windows CD--the CD ROM light comes on, but the PC still stops at the same spot.
The hard drive light is on continuously and is red--I do not know if it is normally red, but it does not flash when trying to read from the drive during the very initial phases of the POST. There are no beeps during this partial startup. I have checked all cables and connections, including the RAM chips, and everything seems secure.
Any ideas of what is happening or what I should do next?
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Since you've confirmed the jumper settings go back and change the boot order from the floppy to the CD-Rom drive. As long as bios can see the CD-Rom drive it should be fine. Perhaps you simply forgot to change the boot order and it goes to the HD before CD-Rom. Insert the OS CD and restart. Try this to format and reinstall OS.
You need to try with all IDE devices disconnected first. Basically you want to get to the point where the computer asks for an operating system ("Non-system disk or disk error"). If you get there, you begin hooking up components until you get the hangup back and this will tell you which component is faulty.
You may have a corrupted CMOS, and this can sometimes be cured by a reset. This is done by moving a jumper to the "reset" position, or by removing the CMOS battery for a few minutes.
/RID
I am embarrassed that this question has been open so long. I came to the conclusion the motherboard was bad and replaced the PC. It may have been the CMOS, but I did not have time to delve into it. I still have the PC and it is on my "To Do" list to someday solve the problem. If I ever find what was wrong, I will try to remember to let you know.
Thanks to all for the advice.
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by: Huseyin1Posted on 2003-10-22 at 06:46:30ID: 9598699
Hi
The only thing I can think of is maybe you did not move the jumper on the other HDD that you put into this machine, check the jumper make sure itis set on MS.
Now put the boot disk in and the OS in the CD ROM drive and reboot, hopefully you will get to the blue install screen.
H