annoying boot problem

[Kevin Nelson]

Ok, this is a bit long.

I am trying to repair a friends computer, I think their motherboard shorted
out. The reasoning being when they hit the start button the power comes on
for about a second and then goes off. I switched out power supplies and got
the same response.

Not having another motherboard handy I took just their ram and hard drive
and put them into another computer. they are running windows 2000 and I
figured that would work. ha-ha jokes on me.

on powerup I got "pri master drive - atapi incompatible. press f1 to
continue"
when I press f1 I get "boot failure, insert BOOT diskette in A:, press any
key when ready"

I changed the bios boot floppy, hard drive 0 and then cd-rom. restarted and
got the same response. I changed it to hard drive, floppy and then cd-rom
and still no luck.

then I got out the win2k boot disks figuring to reinstall. disks loaded ok
and the beginning of the install on the cd started. got as far as the first
restart of the computer. took the floppy out and restarted the computer.

guess what I got

"pri master drive - atapi incompatible. press f1 to continue"
when I press f1 I get "boot failure, insert BOOT diskette in A:, press any
key when ready"

then I changed the cd, same response.

the jumper on the hard drive is set to master, the one on the cd set to
slave.

short of telling them to buy a new computer, is there any other course of
action I can take to get this working?

Thanks

 

[Jud]

Snip

"pri master drive - atapi incompatible. press f1 to continue"
when I press f1 I get "boot failure, insert BOOT diskette in A:, press any
key when ready"

This happens when you have a hard drive that doesn't like the CD rom that is
attached or vice versa,

Some HD's have specific jumper settings when using a non atapi type drive as
a slave to it.

Try another CD.
And make sure your BIOS supports the drive size

Just to show you what I mean about fussy PC's, I have a perfectly good 40
GIG Seagate HD , the unit is tested with seatools and all is ok
I also have a 4 GIG Seagate again tested ok, Both will boot OK in one
machine that I have but not in the other, they wont detect if I put in a
certain type of CD rom drive, but will happily detect if it's removed.

Strange

Jud