I'm posting this just to share the knowledge, hoping it will save
someone an hour or two of troubleshooting time.
Symptoms: While the memory was being tested during POST, the screen did
not show the memory "counter." It merely displayed the total of 262144
KB as being okay and showed 8192 KB as shared memory. Then the Detecting
IDE Drives message appeared and everything froze at point. The hard
drive activity light remained on steady (no flickering). Pressing Del
during boot would not give me access to the BIOS setup (to try to load
default CMOS values). Ctrl-Alt-Del would reboot the computer.
To get right to the solution, once I unplugged the CD-ROM (it was master
on the secondary IDE channel), everything worked okay after that.
Following the advice of many others, I had reseated all three PCI cards,
both memory banks, the CPU, and the three drive connectors (floppy,
Primary and Secondary IDE). I also unplugged the power cord and removed
the CMOS battery for over a minute, during which I shorted the positive
terminal to ground. All power supply voltages measured as okay.
None of these efforts cured the problem.
It wasn't until I tried booting with all three drive connectors
unplugged that I got past the Detecting IDE Drives error message. The
new message when POST completed was that there were no primary or
secondary masters or slaves, and the floppy was missing. I plugged the
connectors in one at a time and isolated the problem to the CD-ROM. By
unplugging the CD-ROM first at mobo connector, then at the CD-ROM end of
the cable, I determined that the cable itself was not a problem (a short
in it, for example).
(My thanks to Hack Ace for his 2003 advice, response 2, here:
http://www.computing.net/answers/win...ves/80188.html.)
I put a spare DVD burner on the end of the CD-ROM cable and it and
everything else worked perfectly. As a precaution, I changed the CMOS
battery (it was maybe six years old).
The computer was a no-name clone from a mom-and-pop type store, and
worked well for many years, running Windows ME when purchased for
several years then "upgraded" to W2K. The defective, rarely used CD-ROM
was a Samsung unit manufactured in January 2001.
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