Changed the BIOS and still not booting from disk....

[audigy642]

I have a computer that constantly reboots itself. I replaced the Power Supply because that is the solution that I found that I thought was right. Unfortunatly that didn't work.. I plugged it in and it still did the same thing.

Needless to say that I found that the boot.ini file is missing so I attempt to load the Windows XP professional CD in the drive to repair it and it doesn't even detect it. I've gone into the BIOs and changed it so that it boots from cd first and it's still not letting me boot from cd.

Is there anything I could possibly be missing?

[sittas87]

Hi
firstly when you change the BIOS settings do you actually safe the settings? i know it sounds silly but happened to silly me before. See if you're data cable is pluged in. You're power cable might be plugged in so you can open and close you're drive but that doesnt mean you're data cable is in for data to be transfered from cd to system. lastly make sure the OS disk is bootable. If the disk isnt Bootable theres no way it will work. Try a known Bootable disk and seepost me some replies

cheers and Goodluck
sittas

[Chaky]

Try disabling "quick POST" in your BIOS. It will force your machine to do extra testings when powering on. It might give you an error message of whatever is wrong with it. Also, a beeper would be very helpful in your situation. Do you have one installed? If so, please post any beep-codes you receive.

[audigy642]

Try disabling "quick POST" in your BIOS. It will force your machine to do extra testings when powering on. It might give you an error message of whatever is wrong with it. Also, a beeper would be very helpful in your situation. Do you have one installed? If so, please post any beep-codes you receive.

All it's telling me now is that the operating system is not found when the hard drive is correctly set in there and there is power to everything. It finds the cdrom drive but I can't get it to boot from there. It is a bootable disk because I checked it on another computer.

I've replaced the harddrive with a different one and it tells me the same thing, operating system not found, even though I know theres one on there because 10 minutes before it booted me into windows 98.

[Chaky]

I can think of couple of causes for this, beside the faulty drive.

- Incorrect BIOS settings
- Faulty BIOS (unlikely, but possible)
- Faulty on-board IDE controller (most likely)
- Faulty power supply for the drive (a.k.a. Molex)
- Faulty IDE cable (I hope so)

For the settings, default BIOS settings should generally work. You can try manually downgrading the transfer mode to PIO 0. It is the most compatible one.

Faulty BIOS can be resolved by flashing.

Regarding the on-board IDE controller, it can be bypassed by installing IDE controller PCI card. In that case you should disable the on-board controller. Otherwise it will be in conflict.

P.S. Try with different IDE cable and with different molex plug

[sittas87]

Hi

Try this:
Insert you're HD in another machine and install a OS on you're HD. after the files has copied to you're HD and is busy restarting, shut the machine off completely and remove you're HD. put it back into you're machine and let it run to the completion of the installation. if all goes well up on till the point where you place the HD in you're machine but fails to contineu than the problem lies somewhere else and not with you're disk

[matrix_3]

I think it is Faulty IDE cable

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[Chaky]

Could be master-slave conflict...

[caperjack]

could be many things for sure, when you change the bios to boot to the cdrom ,did it keep the setting to boot to the cdrom ,if not you could have a dead bios battery and its not saving the changes ,