OT: pc question for you tech guys

[pepsiDX20]

Maybe somebody here can help me. I just built a pc about 4 months ago.Its an Amd athlon 850,128sdram. I have 2 hard drives and a dvd-rom. The probelm is about a week ago the computer started up and setup would not detect any of the drives, it just says "boot failure insert disk". It would only do it once in awhile now its doing everytime I start up the computer. I ussually just hit the reset button a couple of times and it will boot up normally. Any ideas on how to fix this? any help greatly appriciated.

ps. No conflicts in system manager and everything in cmos is setup correcty.

[Vilas]

Well, I'm a tech chick, rather than a tech guy, but I do work n the field.
Are these ide drives or scsi? What OS are you running?
You might want to just crack the case and reseat the drives..

[Q-ball]

I guess I count as a tech guy...didn't graduate yet, but I'll agree with Vilas...assuming you don't have a floppy disk stuck in the drive, yeah, I'd reopen the case & reseat the drives & all cables connecting them. If that don't work, and you're running windows...well, windows imo should be reloaded about every 6 mths anyhow so you're about due:D HTH

Q!!!

[pepsiDX20]

Both drives are ide and o/s is win98. This stared happening after a acciently left a dvd in the drive. its been doing it ever since.Is that what caused it?

[Vilas]

I don't think a dvd left in a drive would have this effect on anything - sounds like a shady connection, a shady cable, or a shady drive. It dosen't seem like a win* problem, it looks like it's not even getting far enough in the boot process to touch the OS.
I'd check the cables to the drives, including the power cables. Make sure they're firm on both ends, and even if they feel firm, unplug them and reseat them.
If it makes you feel any better, I recently had to do the same to my 6 terrabyte array. That's a lot of cables to check, bleh. Fixed the soft scsi errors and failover problems, however.. :)

[DeepBlue]

peps,
Do the easiest stuff first.
I agree with Vilas, however check the connections at BOTH ends, not just the drive but at the motherboard also. The intermittent and now constant problem has me thinking it is a mechanical connection that has gotten worse via the heat/cool cycle of startups and shutdowns.

Q makes a point about a reload, I do one on my units at home abt once a year. Its amazing how problems go away and how much faster the system runs with a clean registry. Remember you're dealing with Winblows and not a real stable OS like Solaris and Linux.

I had something similar happen quite a while back when one of my kids removed a floppy before switching to a hard drive in file manager. The machine kept looking for a disk in A:. The machine just sat there cycling until I put a flop in the drive and then pointed to c:. After that all was well.
If its something pooched in the registry you may want to uninstall the drivers for the DVD and then reinstall them.
Good Luck. This is why I like my machine in work the best. Sun Ultra60/Solaris8 OS. The only things that could keep it from booting are no power or running a dump truck over the case.

[pepsiDX20]

thanks people, I've been real lazy about taken the case out cuase its in my desk. but at least it gives me the chance to slap some more ram in there while im at it.
thanks again for the replys

[hartman]

pepsiDX20,

Check your bios, It is most likely boots floppy/CD-DVD/Hard drive. If this is the case you can either make sure you boot only with the dvd empty or swap the boot disk order. Keep in mind the DVD and CD-ROM is basically the same to the computer.

Hartman

[Nagel]

Vilas:

What the heck do you need a 6 terrabyte array in your house for?!?!? I thought I was a hard drive hog with 2 20GB and 2 30 GB drives for audio recording!@!@

just curious!

ps. another thought for pepsidx20
Check and make sure that the battery for your bios on the mobo is still good. Though this is a new mobo, and it should not be bad, its an easy one to rule out. A bad battery there would reset the bios every time. Unplug and replug like vilas suggested, I know that can be tedious, but in 10 years of building systems, that seems to be a big culprit, even when the cable looks fully seated and nobody has opened the case. Also, regarding hartmans suggestion, make your primary IDE your bootup, the only time you need floppy boot is if theres something wrong, and you can easily change it if you need to, and almost never will you boot from the cdrom unless you are installing something like linux to your machine.