motherboard (i think) help

[Aj_5108]

hey, i have a EPoX 8k3a+ motherboard and it doesnt want to find my hard drive (seagate 40gb), it finds the burner and dvd-rom fine. i just turned on computer one day and got the error "BOOT DISK FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER", the hard drive i think is fine it showed up when i put it in another computer. - putting in any boot disks or windows disks didnt help :\

ive tried many things if anyone could help i'd much appreciate it.

thanks in advance
Aj

[Rudegar]

did you try a new cable ?

are you sure that the boot.ini Ntldr and Ntdetect.com
were not removed from the root ?

[Aj_5108]

i tried new cables, i copied ntldr and ntdetect to windows folder (to my hard drive from another pc). am i supposed to do the same for boot.ini?

[Rudegar]

yes and boot ini needs to point to where the install is at

this is how mine looks

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

you dont even need to copy them to the disk you can just copy those 3 to a disk and then boot from the disk
it will not really boot from the disk it'll just get the settings and then start to load from the harddisk
then when you get into windows you copy those 3 files to the root of your disk and you are back in buiness

it all comes down to getting the boot.ini to point to the right disk

[Aj_5108]

i c, from what ive found i cant load from any disks, floppy or cd's. so i put my hard drive back into this computer, put windows cd in and copy boot.ini to c:/windows , open boot.ini and make sure it looks somewhat like yours. ill have to do it 2morrow so i'll post back how it went.

[Rudegar]

it should be copied to c: (if that is your bootdrive)
not to windows dir

p.s.
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(!!!2)\WIN DOWS
would often be 1 for many others but is 2 for me because c: is the 2th partition on the disk
diffrent 0's before it is because my disk is on the onboard ide cntrl
on the primary and is master

[Aj_5108]

hmm, i cant seem to find boot.ini anywhere. and was that just boot.ini not in the windows folder or the other 2 as well? theirs only boot.ini.backup (that was on this computer not the xp cd)

[Rudegar]

yes all 3 files should be in the root as in c:
and boot.ini is just a text file
any will do as long as it point to the right path or you modify it to do so
you can even make a booti.ini yourself with a normal text editor

[therealwesty]

Rude's idea to boot of a floppy drive is probobly going to be the easiest. You may have to poke around the BIOS a bit and make sure that the floppy drive is in the boot sequence. And the three files do indeed belong in C:\ rather than C:\Windows.

Just for clarity here is what my boot.ini file contains. Just copy this into notepad and name the file boot.ini and it will work.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

[Rudegar]

for some odd reason the forum add a space in the boot.ini copy paste
the space between window and s should not be there

[Aj_5108]

ok i think its set, thanks alot for your help, just hope it works. just copying to a disk now.

**edit: no good :S it didnt look at the floppy at all, even if i set it in bios. maybe the floppy drive isnt working, could that be the cause of this?

this time it only found 1 of my cd drives as well.

[DoK]

I got that same error with my spare rig a while back. It was a simple fix for me, I just switched the hard drive and optical drive IDE channels (cd-rom was in IDE1 and hard drive was in IDE2). After putting the hard drive on the primary channel and the CD-ROM on the secondary channel, it worked fine.

You may have already tried this, but this is all I have to offer :(

[Aj_5108]

thanks anyway but i've already tried that. nothing seems to work, it detects the 2 cd drives in bios in either IDE channels, but not the hard drive, even if i use the hard drive with the same cables the cd drives just worked on.

[gokusimpson]

Did you change the boot order of your drives?

[Aj_5108]

yeh i changed it to cd-rom, hdd-0, hdd-1

[gokusimpson]

Try putting your hdd to the first place.

[Aj_5108]

tried that as well :) im gonna try a format, someone said it would put new drivers on the mobo which mite help :S

**Edit: tried reseting motherboard by taking out battery, no good.

[Rudegar]

well drivers will not be loaded before windows is
so i doubt it would help if the problem is before windows is even detected

[TKDJ007]

well change the jumps to chs if you computer reads it it will not boot so you gotta flash your bios then slam it back into primary just don't flash the wrong bios or you'll get mad at me for telling you this i had the same problem once