why cant I boot from any hard drive?

[goaliehammy]

Hi
I cannot get my computer (p3 700mhz)to boot from my hard drives a wd 20gig and a seagate 2 gig. I have tried the hard drives in another machine and they are working ok. I also tried installing another hard drive from a working machine which it also wouldnt boot from, I have also installed my hard drives in another machine which boots them up with no problems. At start up my machine recognises all the hard drives but will not boot up, if I boot up using a floppy I can access the drives and read the information that is stored on them. I have changed the primary ide 80 conductor cable. with no success. I have also tried every boot sequence from the bios, and have tried the jumpers on the hard drives in every position but still cannot boot from the hard drive. What am I missing?

 

[paparazi]

goaliehammy
A statement of fact: for your system to have a gauranteed sucessfuly boot from any hard drive, the operating system on those drives needs to have been configured on your particular system.
You simply cannot swop hard drives around and still expect your system to boot properly. This is because of major hardware and driver differances on the systems to which each of those hard drives were configured (unless of course all the drives had their operating systems installed and configured on the one system)
Also to boot from a particular hard drive that drive obviously needs to have had an operating system installed on it.
If it is just a question of wanting to access data from these drives, you should be able to connect them one at a time as slave drives to a known good bootable drive which will enable you to copy your stuff across.
Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[goaliehammy]

Thanks Martin
I did not expect a successful boot from all the hard drives, I expected the computer to boot from the original hard drive which was configured for this machine. and was working until I tried to slave the seagate 2 gig hard drive. when this was unsuccessful I removed the 2 gig and went back to the original setup which wouldnt work and is where I am at present. I also take your point about swopping hard drives without configuring it to the machine but how then when I boot straight into the windows xp cd on my own computer and install the operating system, at restart it does not recognise the hard drive and attempts to re install the programme not just continue with the original installation. It appears as if some command is preventing access to the hard drive to allow it to boot. davie

 

[paparazi]

This last point
When it restarts for the final time are you touching any keys? because it should say something like boot from cdrom but if you don't touch any key it should continue finalizing installation.
Whilst you have a bootable CD in the drive and whilst the CDrom is set first in the boot sequence, the system will always "look at" that boot disk first before continuing with the boot from the HDD.
Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[goaliehammy]

No I am not touching the keypad, and I have the cdrom set third in the boot sequence. I set up the 2 gig hard drive on another machine using the same routine and as you say it gave me the option on re-start of booting from the cd if I pressed any key and from the hard drive if I did not. this setup was successful but it was not on my machine.
I am at a complete loss as to what I do from here.
Davie

 

[wolluf]

So what drive(s) have you got in the machine now? The 20GB - you've removed the 2GB - but you mentioned another drive.

And its ignoring everything except the install CD, which its booting from, even if you hit no keys?

How about putting the CD as first boot device (and not hitting any keys of course) and target hard drive as second?

 

[goaliehammy]

I have the 20 gig drive in the machine just now. I tried a wd 80gig from my mates comp and it would not boot it either, and I no for sure that the three drives work. When I installed both the 2 & the 20 gig drives into my mates machine one at a time they both boot up and I was easily able to set up a new windows xp installation on both drives. his machine would boot and access the drives with no errors, this would imply that the drives are working ok. So what is preventing my machine from booting from any of the three drives? it boots from floppy and cdrom ok but not hard drive. At present I have stripped all drives and cables from the mother board and im checking all the connections including the memory from scratch to see if some how one is loose, but after this I dont know whats left.

Davie

 

[Freestone]

Is there some kind of antivirus protection enabled in BIOS which somehow prevents the boot sector from being written correctly during the install of XP?

 

[micker377]

What is the master/slave jumper situation? Some drives have master only/master with slave/slave/cs (cable select). If set as master only, it won't work with with a slave. I've even seen older drives that work as master only, and will not accept any slave.