Member Avatar for sagiblin

HEy Gang I have a UWAVE motherboard with 3 pc133 ram sticks128mb ea, I was able to boot from a cd and format the hard drive in both fat32 and ntfs, at different times, but both time as it restarted there would only be a blank screen shown. no beeps no noise no screen flicker!!!!!!!
any on know what direction I could take to fix this? also when I pull out the disk and restart it tells me that the ntldr is missing!~ how do I fix that?!?!?

source OS iso file burned to disk through IMGBURN

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Quick summary: can boot the machine from a CD and perform a format, but after the machine restarts the screen goes completely blank. pointed at low-level disk cleanup and covered making a drive bootable — both are reasonable directions. Below are practical, non-destructive checks to narrow the fault before doing any destructive disk work.

Start with hardware isolation:

  • Remove all non-essential devices (extra drives, add‑in cards). Boot with one RAM stick in the slot the manual recommends. Swap the video cable/port or try a different monitor.
  • Reseat power and data cables to the hard drive, and try a different IDE/SATA cable or port. If PATA, confirm master/slave jumper positions visually.
  • Confirm the board actually POSTs: case speaker, diagnostic LEDs, or a POST card can show whether POST finishes. A missing speaker can hide beep codes, so don’t rely on silence alone.
  • If possible, move the hard drive into another PC or hook it in a USB enclosure to verify the drive’s contents and health.

Install/media and firmware checks:

  • Verify the installer media (try a freshly burned disc at a slower speed or a different media type). Try a small live environment (Linux live CD/USB) to see whether the system can boot to something non‑Windows.
  • Check BIOS settings: ensure the drive is detected and the controller mode (IDE/AHCI/RAID) matches how the installer handled the disk. If the board has a known BIOS update for better device compatibility, consider updating after confirming the machine is stable.

If the BIOS sees the disk but the system still goes black after restarting, the next safe step is to use a recovery/rescue environment (not immediate destructive wiping) to examine boot records and partition flags. Take backups or image the drive before any zeroing or low-level wipes.

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Member Avatar for HoustonIT

Do you have any other partitions on the drive? It soulds like your mbr may be corrupt. I've had similar problems in the past, and what I've found works best is to run killdisk or an equivilant drive cleaner and then format and load an os.

Member Avatar for Chaky

You will need either FDISK (on bootable floppy, found in Windows 9x in the Windows/command folder) or Windows XP setup CD to make the HD bootable. The drive must be set as ACTIVE in its boot sector. You can use FDISK (FAT16/FAT32 only) to set it manually or simply format the drive with windows XP setup program (FAT32/NTFS), in which case it will be automatically set as active, but with no OS installed whatsoever, unless you proceed with XP installation.

If you are planning to use Windows 9x, I suggest that you make a bootable floppy on existing Windows 9x platform and manually copy FORMAT.EXE and FDISK.EXE to that floppy (Windows XP bootable floppy does not include CD drivers bundle). That way you can boot via floppy and have needed drivers for CD. Once you boot via floppy, you will need to to this:

- Start FDISK by typing "FDISK".
- Once prompted for large partition support choose yes (actually, "Yes" means FAT32, and "No" means FAT16 with 2GB per partition limit)
- create a logical drive/primary partition and set it as active (if not automatically.. check the status)
- you must reboot for the changes to be registered with BIOS
- once rebooted (again, via floppy) type this:
FORMAT C: /s
- once it finishes, you will have bootable HD with minimal OS. I suggest that you copy contents of the Windows 98 contents directly to HD. Type:

C:
MD SETUP
COPY D:\SETUP\*.* C:\SETUP

After that reboot and change the boot sequence in BIOS to HD first, and run windows setup from command prompt. Type:

CD SETUP
SETUP

If you run windows setup while the machine is booted from floppy, it will take allot longer to complete the first round of setup. Your floppy will be extensively read from, and it will slow down everything allot.

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