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Hard Drive wont boot

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by jazz23 1 view

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Hope someone can give me a few pointers

Got a machine which goes through the POST not problems with the standard one beep to let you know all is ok.

Detects A:\
Gets to the HDD and sits for a bout 2 mins then comes up with the following errormessage

Drive not Ready
Insert BOOT diskette in A:
Press any key to continue.

I have replaced the existing drive (Disk 1) with a spare (Disk 2) and get the same problem. Yet on another machine disk 1 and disk 2 boots fine.

Thought it was the HDD controller on the MOBO, so placed in a Winbond I/O Card, disabled all HDD and FDD controllers in the BIOS and rebooted. Again can boot fine off the floppy but both drive will not boot giving the above error.

I'm starting to run out of idea. . anyone got any suggestions

Its a Gateway Computer P5-200
(Currently searching for mobo information)

Cheers

Mike

11 replies

by maintenance man

Hi
This might be a long shot or maybe you have done this? Does the BIOS detect your disk 1 and disk 2. Go into setup and have it detect your hard drive making sure if you are using both hard drives that one is master and the other is slave.
Did you try and replace the cable?

Depending on what operating system you are trying to install have you run fdisk and partitioned the drive to FAT 16 or FAT 32 or NTFS. Mind you this might not matter until you try to install your operating system. Hopethis helps. I will keep thinking and let you know if I come up with anything farther

by cg it

humm you say the drives boot fine on another machine? Since you took them off the primary Controller and used a 3rd party controller and still have the same problem try replacing the data cables.

by thechas

How big are the drives?

Are they larger than 8.4GB?

If so, they may be too big for the BIOS on the motherboard.

Also, when using an external IDE controller, you need to set the boot sequence in BIOS settings to include SCSI.
SCSI is the default for ALL external drive controllers on Pentium and newer systems.

Chas

by europanorama

if fdisk shows fat16 instead of fat32 then only 2gb are shown and maybe it cannot boot. to the experts: can partition magic change this fat 16 to fat32?

by debbi irene

When installing these drives in the other PC are you sure you are duplicating every detail? Same master, same slave? if not check jumpers. Same cable? You might have the wrong size cable - is it 40 pin or 80 pin? Are you sure the cable is inserted with the one pins matching on the mother board and on the drives?

One more question, when you boot using your floppy are you able to access the hard drives? Try typing C:\ and D:\. Can you access the drives this way?

by jazz23

Thanks for everyone's help on this. Problem solved. Seemed it was a problem with the Gateway BIOS. It accepted the Auto and CHS settings but would not boot, until a format of the HDD on the offending PC, then everything worked. This happened on 3 HDDs . . can't really explain it and neither can Gateway . . once again thanks

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