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Boot Problems

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by fordtrucker97

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I have an old 2002 tower made by northgate running phoenix bios and xp pro. when i try to boot it stops at post and says boot failure insert os disc and press enter, i do that and the same thing comes back. it has a red light on the motherboard. if i disconnect the cd drive and try to turn on it quickly turns of and wont turn back on unless i turn the power supply off and push power again. there are no beep codes. is there software that can run full diagnostics that runs on initial power on? also i could care less about the files so i was thinking of making the hdd a slave on another computer an deleting the parition to see if that worked.

7 replies

by ic-it

Go into the BIOS and verify the boot order. Sometimes they will hiccup and add aSCSI disk to the scheme and/or no hard drive.

by fordtrucker97

Tried to boot to cd as first and hdd 2nd and still did the same thing. also ive tried the normal 1st hdd 2nd cd and 3rd floppy and still the same thing. by the way i could care less about the files so i was thinking of making the hdd a slave on another computer an deleting the parition to see if that worked.

by gmpont

Your system board is doing some suspect things, like the red light and the shutdown issue when the CD drive is unplugged.

A couple of things I would try is booting into a linux distro from CD. Any CD-bootable one will do. I keep Knoppix and Ubuntu bootable CD's around expressly for this purpose.

Another thing I would try is pulling the hard drive and trying to boot another PC with it. You don't have to boot to the desktop, you just want to verify that it gets to the Windows boot loader and begins loading the OS.

Does the POST screen correctly call out your attached IDE devices?

An easy troubleshooting check that you can do is switch out your IDE cables with ones that you know are good. It may sound silly, but I've seen cables go bad and do some really flaky things.

Basically, you want to eliminate possible points of failure wherever possible.

by fordtrucker97

The HDD boots on another PC and the bad one correctly id's the IDE drives. i tried to boot with a OS cd and the errors are still there saying insert OS disc.

by jbencsik

Perhaps its a bad IDE controller on the motherboard?

You could always pick up a PCI IDE controller and try plugging your drives into that. It's worth a try as they're pretty cheap.

Never know, you may get lucky.

by gmpont

It really does sound like an IDE controller issue, but I would seriously try some other IDE cables first, just to be sure you don't scrap a $100+ part because of a $1 defective one.

I would try flashing the motherboard bios with the latest offered by it's manufacturer. An updated BIOS and a reset to default settings would be the last things I can think of to try.

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