Asus MB problem - help?

N

Nick

I'm truly stumped on this one. Just put this together Friday:

A7N8X-X
Barton 2500 + (not the mobile CPU)
512 M of Kingston PC 3200 (what Asus recc'd)
WD 80G HD

I can install XP all I want.. when I reboot, if the XP CD is not in the
box, it refuses to run - I get 'DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND
PRESS ENTER'.

If the XP CD is in the system, I can run just fine, install anything, etc.,
etc.

I've replaced the IDE cable, the HD tests fine with WD's diagnostics (from
a boot CD), and I'm just unable to come up with anything else at this
point. The CPU is running at 166, the memory frequency is at 100, and I'm
out of ideas. Help!
 
J

Jan Alter

In the bios does changing the boot order do anything for you?
Like I would expect the order to be changed back to "First device -hdd 0"

I wonder also if resetting the bios to defaults by removing the battery
might work.
 
W

William W. Plummer

DaveW said:
In the BIOS have you now set the harddrive as the First Boot Device? It may

Make your first boot device be your CD ROM. That will cause BIOS to ask
you if you want to boot from it. If you don't type a character, it will go
on to try your FLOPPY which should be second. Finally, the third device
should be HDD-0 or SCSI if you have a SCSI disk or SATA. If you make the
hard disk the First device, and you haven't put the OS on it yet, it will
always fail and won't go on to try the other boot devices.

You get the BOOT FAILURE because none of your drives is bootable. You
won't be able to boot from the hard drive until you install the operating
system (XP) on it. You will need a floppy disk with vendor supplied drivers
for the disk in many cases. Push F6 just after booting the XP install
disk -- read the bottom line.
 
J

John P

Nick said:
I'm truly stumped on this one. Just put this together Friday:

A7N8X-X
Barton 2500 + (not the mobile CPU)
512 M of Kingston PC 3200 (what Asus recc'd)
WD 80G HD

I can install XP all I want.. when I reboot, if the XP CD is
not in the box, it refuses to run - I get 'DISK BOOT FAILURE,
INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER'.


Very much sounds like the MBR of the WD HDD is not right. Use a
utility like Partition Magic (or Bootit) launched from a floppy to
make sure that the particular MBR entry for your XP drive is
desinated as the "active" one. There is only one active MBR entry
at a time and it sounds as if it is one of the other three which
will be blank unless you have other partitions on the HDD.

Also watch out that XP may (I am not competely sure about this)
need to be in the *first* of the four slots in the MBR.

Seems that your re-installing XP is not changing the MBR settings
but the first time the partition was formatted as part of the XP
setup it should have been set up correctly by the installer
program.
If the XP CD is in the system, I can run just fine, install
anything, etc., etc.

It is booting off the CD and then calling XP on the HDD via the
preset info on the CD regarding where boot.ini points the system to
look for the OS.
I've replaced the IDE cable, the HD tests fine with WD's
diagnostics (from a boot CD), and I'm just unable to come up
with anything else at this point. The CPU is running at 166,
the memory frequency is at 100, and I'm out of ideas. Help!

All these would still work if the MBR is not set right.

Just my 2 cents worth.
 

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