drive not ready

[jim178]

error on bootup message reads

"drive not ready
insert boot diskette in a:
press any key when ready"

i have placed
new floppy drive
new battery in motherboard
new hard drive
new image
when going into cmos auto detects hard drive and then boots ok

my thoughts are motherboard problem
any other ideas
thanks in anticipation

 

[BadBigBen]

Yeah, two...

have you tried new IDE cable?

check your power connector to drive?

Ben

 

[edfair]

If from cold boot it is an indication that the processor is getting to boot time before the drive is getting there.
On those of mine that have had the problem I powered up, then hit the reset switch two seconds later.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[ceh4702]

Check the jumpers on the drives. There is two ways to do this normally:

1: On each IDE cable you have one Master and one Slave.

2: On each IDE Cable you have both devices set to Cabel Select (CS).

Sometimes cable select will not work for difficult setups or older cable. On the newer cables all 3 connectors are a different color. At least most of them are. There are a lot of Cables sold out there.

On a motherboard make sure you have installed the Chipset Drivers for your motherboard, after installing the OS. This helps the OS to see things like the IDE Ports, and other misc items like the PCI-IDE Bridge or other motherboard hardware that may not be working. If you install a new motherboard you may be able to do a repair installation to fix the problems wothout writing zeros to the beginning of the drive, deleting partitions, and Formatting the drives.

With WinXP you have to write Zeros to the drive to get rid of the last setup. XP writes info to the front of the drive, and is difficult to get rid of without writing Zeros to the front of the drive.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[skwiggley]

Have you tried playing with the boot order? It's interesting that it will work after going into the BIOS. Does it give the same error if you remove the floppy drive and from the computer and BIOS? What about if you remove the hard drive? ...And there's no CD in the CD drive, right? Or in the BIOS, reset the defaults.

I'd be interested to hear how/when you fix this.

Good luck!

 

[jim178]

well thanks to all i have not worked it out yet but this happened on a machine that the box has not been touched and was working one day and not the next.
i have a tech coming to have a look in a couple of days will let you know what happens thanks again