New build, having a problem

[CapCity]

I'm putting together a new computer. I have:

MSI 865PE Neo2-LS motherboard
Intel 2.4 P IV processor
1 GB DDR RAM (2 512MB sticks)
Ultra ATA PCI Card
60 GB Maxtor hard drive is master device on Ultra ATA's primary channel -
nothing else on this card
Primary IDE Master device - Mad Dog 16x DVD-ROM
Primary IDE Slave - None
Secondary IDE Master - TDK 440N DVD+/-RW
Secondary IDE Slave - None
Ti 4200 nVidea AGP Graphics Card

DVD-ROM, Video card and hard drive are from another system and have been
working fine for a while. Everything else is new.

Hard drive is from a Win98SE box so is formatted FAT32 and it has no
operating system installed on it. I want to put Windows XP Pro on this, I
have a CD only. I'm OK with the reformat of the hard drive.

Everything is together and the boot sequence starts fine. I see the
description of the video card, then the description of the ATA card. The ATA
card is scanned and the make and model of the hard drive is displayed, so
that's all cool, the motherboard can negotiate with the ATA card. Then it
says there is a boot failure (no O/S, so no surprise) but then says to place
a boot disk in the floppy. I then realize that there no mention of the IDE
channels during the boot. I only have a CD, so I need to install from the
IDE.

This is the second Neo2-LS motherboard I've tried, the first one had a
timing problem and wouldn't boot if I had 2 sticks of RAM installed, only 1.
It, too, never mentioned the IDE channels, so I don't think this is a defect
limited to the particular board I have now. Also, I see no messages during
boot about getting into the CMOS setup.

The MSI tech support guy suggested (thru e-mail) that I remove the ATA card,
install Windows, then try to put the card back in. I replied to him, wanting
to make sure he understood the problem. If I remove the ATA card then the
hard drive has to go on an IDE ribbon, but the board does not seem to detect
the IDEs. Also, if the presence of the ATA card is causing the board to not
see the IDE channels then what good would putting that board back in do
after Windows is installed? During boot, Windows isn't much of a factor, is
it?

Anyone ever experience something like this? How do I get the IDE channels to
be noticed?

Thanks in advance!

 

[kevins_news]

I'm putting together a new computer. I have:

MSI 865PE Neo2-LS motherboard
Intel 2.4 P IV processor
1 GB DDR RAM (2 512MB sticks)
Ultra ATA PCI Card
60 GB Maxtor hard drive is master device on Ultra ATA's primary channel -
nothing else on this card
Primary IDE Master device - Mad Dog 16x DVD-ROM
Primary IDE Slave - None
Secondary IDE Master - TDK 440N DVD+/-RW
Secondary IDE Slave - None
Ti 4200 nVidea AGP Graphics Card

DVD-ROM, Video card and hard drive are from another system and have been
working fine for a while. Everything else is new.

Hard drive is from a Win98SE box so is formatted FAT32 and it has no
operating system installed on it. I want to put Windows XP Pro on this, I
have a CD only. I'm OK with the reformat of the hard drive.

Everything is together and the boot sequence starts fine. I see the
description of the video card, then the description of the ATA card. The ATA
card is scanned and the make and model of the hard drive is displayed, so
that's all cool, the motherboard can negotiate with the ATA card. Then it
says there is a boot failure (no O/S, so no surprise) but then says to place
a boot disk in the floppy. I then realize that there no mention of the IDE
channels during the boot. I only have a CD, so I need to install from the
IDE.

This is the second Neo2-LS motherboard I've tried, the first one had a
timing problem and wouldn't boot if I had 2 sticks of RAM installed, only 1.
It, too, never mentioned the IDE channels, so I don't think this is a defect
limited to the particular board I have now. Also, I see no messages during
boot about getting into the CMOS setup.

The MSI tech support guy suggested (thru e-mail) that I remove the ATA card,
install Windows, then try to put the card back in. I replied to him, wanting
to make sure he understood the problem. If I remove the ATA card then the
hard drive has to go on an IDE ribbon, but the board does not seem to detect
the IDEs. Also, if the presence of the ATA card is causing the board to not
see the IDE channels then what good would putting that board back in do
after Windows is installed? During boot, Windows isn't much of a factor, is
it?

Anyone ever experience something like this? How do I get the IDE channels to
be noticed?

Thanks in advance!

On my motherboard there is a section in the bios that lets me set
which devices i want to attempt to boot from, and in what order. This
particular motherboard had an onboard Promise IDE ATA100 controller.
So there are 4 IDE connections on the motherboard. ATA100
primary/secondary and IDE primary/secondary.

I have an Maxtor ata100 drive (my boot drive) attached to the ATA100
primary and a IBM deskstar 20 gig drive attatched to the IDE primary.
A DVDROM is connected to IDE secondary.

In the bios i have this list:
1. Floppy drive Disable
2. DVDROM Enable
3. ATA/SCSI controller Enable
4. IBM Deskstar 20G Disable

I can toggle the enable/disable switches. And i can also move the
selections up and down. So i could move the DVDROM to be slot three
and put the ATA/SCSI controller in spot two. I'm betting that is the
exact situation you have. When i reinstalled windows i had no OS on
my maxtor drive and the ATA/SCSI was put in spot #2 with DVDROM in #3.
During boot it would tell me that no OS was found on the drive and to
insert a boot disk. It would never find the windows XP disk in the
DVD drive. After moving the DVDROM up in the list, it will try to
boot off of the CD in there before going to the harddrives.

Wait. I just realized that you're using an addon ATA100 card. Well
that's not too much of a problem but it requires a roundabout route.
It seems that when your ATA card is plugged in, it always becomes #1
on that priority list of boot devices. Since it's not part of the
bios i doubt you can change that. And the attatched harddrive has no
OS so it fails. We need an OS on that drive. So this is what you do
(my maxtor drive actually had this in it's instruction manual in the
troubleshooting area).

Remove the ATA card. Plug the harddrive into the regular IDE primary
and the CDROM drive into the IDE secondary. Change your bios so that
it boots off the CDROM before the harddrive. Boot. Boot off the CD.
Install windows on the harddrive. Shut down. Put in ATA100 card.
Attatch your harddrive with Windows XP to the primary ATA100 spot.
Boot.

If i understand the problem then your computer will automatically look
to the harddrive on the ATA100 card. And this time it will find an
OS. And it will boot.

Hope this helps.

Kevin

 

[philo]

I'm putting together a new computer. I have:

MSI 865PE Neo2-LS motherboard
Intel 2.4 P IV processor
1 GB DDR RAM (2 512MB sticks)
Ultra ATA PCI Card
60 GB Maxtor hard drive is master device on Ultra ATA's primary channel -
nothing else on this card
Primary IDE Master device - Mad Dog 16x DVD-ROM
Primary IDE Slave - None
Secondary IDE Master - TDK 440N DVD+/-RW
Secondary IDE Slave - None
Ti 4200 nVidea AGP Graphics Card

DVD-ROM, Video card and hard drive are from another system and have been
working fine for a while. Everything else is new.

Hard drive is from a Win98SE box so is formatted FAT32 and it has no
operating system installed on it. I want to put Windows XP Pro on this, I
have a CD only. I'm OK with the reformat of the hard drive.

Everything is together and the boot sequence starts fine. I see the
description of the video card, then the description of the ATA card. The ATA
card is scanned and the make and model of the hard drive is displayed, so
that's all cool, the motherboard can negotiate with the ATA card. Then it
says there is a boot failure (no O/S, so no surprise) but then says to place
a boot disk in the floppy. I then realize that there no mention of the IDE
channels during the boot. I only have a CD, so I need to install from the
IDE.

just set the bios to boot from cdrom
then boot off your cd and install XP from there
IIRC you will be given a chance to install the drivers for your ATA card
during the installation

btw: if you plan to use the whole 60 gigs as one partition
i recommend NTFS rather than fat32

 

[bluestringer]

I'm putting together a new computer. I have:

MSI 865PE Neo2-LS motherboard
Intel 2.4 P IV processor
1 GB DDR RAM (2 512MB sticks)
Ultra ATA PCI Card
60 GB Maxtor hard drive is master device on Ultra ATA's primary channel -
nothing else on this card
Primary IDE Master device - Mad Dog 16x DVD-ROM
Primary IDE Slave - None
Secondary IDE Master - TDK 440N DVD+/-RW
Secondary IDE Slave - None
Ti 4200 nVidea AGP Graphics Card

DVD-ROM, Video card and hard drive are from another system and have been
working fine for a while. Everything else is new.

Hard drive is from a Win98SE box so is formatted FAT32 and it has no
operating system installed on it. I want to put Windows XP Pro on this, I
have a CD only. I'm OK with the reformat of the hard drive.

Everything is together and the boot sequence starts fine. I see the
description of the video card, then the description of the ATA card. The ATA
card is scanned and the make and model of the hard drive is displayed, so
that's all cool, the motherboard can negotiate with the ATA card. Then it
says there is a boot failure (no O/S, so no surprise) but then says to place
a boot disk in the floppy. I then realize that there no mention of the IDE
channels during the boot. I only have a CD, so I need to install from the
IDE.

This is the second Neo2-LS motherboard I've tried, the first one had a
timing problem and wouldn't boot if I had 2 sticks of RAM installed, only 1.
It, too, never mentioned the IDE channels, so I don't think this is a defect
limited to the particular board I have now. Also, I see no messages during
boot about getting into the CMOS setup.

The MSI tech support guy suggested (thru e-mail) that I remove the ATA card,
install Windows, then try to put the card back in. I replied to him, wanting
to make sure he understood the problem. If I remove the ATA card then the
hard drive has to go on an IDE ribbon, but the board does not seem to detect
the IDEs. Also, if the presence of the ATA card is causing the board to not
see the IDE channels then what good would putting that board back in do
after Windows is installed? During boot, Windows isn't much of a factor, is
it?

Anyone ever experience something like this? How do I get the IDE channels to
be noticed?

Thanks in advance!

Go into BIOS with the delete key, make sure the IDE ports are enabled. Set
CD to first boot device, insert WinXP CD, save and exit. Install OS.

bluestringer

 

[stacey]

I'm putting together a new computer. I have:

MSI 865PE Neo2-LS motherboard
Intel 2.4 P IV processor
1 GB DDR RAM (2 512MB sticks)
Ultra ATA PCI Card
60 GB Maxtor hard drive is master device on Ultra ATA's primary channel -
nothing else on this card
Primary IDE Master device - Mad Dog 16x DVD-ROM
Primary IDE Slave - None
Secondary IDE Master - TDK 440N DVD+/-RW
Secondary IDE Slave - None
Ti 4200 nVidea AGP Graphics Card

DVD-ROM, Video card and hard drive are from another system and have been
working fine for a while. Everything else is new.

Hard drive is from a Win98SE box so is formatted FAT32 and it has no
operating system installed on it. I want to put Windows XP Pro on this, I
have a CD only. I'm OK with the reformat of the hard drive.

Then
it says there is a boot failure (no O/S, so no surprise) but then says to
place a boot disk in the floppy. I then realize that there no mention of
the IDE channels during the boot. I only have a CD, so I need to install
from the IDE.

Another good reason to always have a floppy drive installed... Diagnostics

The MSI tech support guy suggested (thru e-mail) that I remove the ATA
card, install Windows, then try to put the card back in. I replied to him,
wanting to make sure he understood the problem. If I remove the ATA card
then the hard drive has to go on an IDE ribbon, but the board does not
seem to detect the IDEs.

Why are you using an ATA PCI card for the hard drive? Also you do realise
when you are installing XP it's going to ask for a driver -on a floppy- for
this card? So having a floppyless system is going to stop you there as
well..

He is correct, install the drive on the main board and work from there.

Also, if the presence of the ATA card is causing
the board to not see the IDE channels then what good would putting that
board back in do after Windows is installed?

I'd put the drive on the onboard IDE chanel and see what happens. Again I
can't understand why you'd want the IDE on the PCI buss when this chipset
has the IDE controller on the southbridge, instead of adding more noise to
the PCI buss. If you are doing this to get "ata133", that's a joke/hype as
the drive isn't anywhere NEAR the ceiling on ata66 much less ata100. You'll
see ZERO performance gain and very posibly a performance hit doing this.

 

[CapCity]

CapCity wrote:


Why are you using an ATA PCI card for the hard drive? Also you do realise
when you are installing XP it's going to ask for a driver -on a floppy- for
this card? So having a floppyless system is going to stop you there as
well..

I have a floppy drive (I realize I didn't mention it) and I have a floppy
with the drivers. So that's not a problem.

He is correct, install the drive on the main board and work from there.


I'd put the drive on the onboard IDE chanel and see what happens. Again I
can't understand why you'd want the IDE on the PCI buss when this chipset
has the IDE controller on the southbridge, instead of adding more noise to
the PCI buss. If you are doing this to get "ata133", that's a joke/hype as
the drive isn't anywhere NEAR the ceiling on ata66 much less ata100. You'll
see ZERO performance gain and very posibly a performance hit doing this.

I am putting in the ATA card because I want to isolate the DVD-ROM and
burner on separate IDE channels. From experience I've found that each works
*much* better if alone on an IDE channel. My old system had this same exact
configuration and it was no problem. I know I will not see any performance
gain from this, speedwise, but I will see the DVD-ROM and burner work as
they should.

 

[CapCity]

just set the bios to boot from cdrom
then boot off your cd and install XP from there
IIRC you will be given a chance to install the drivers for your ATA card
during the installation

I would, but the DVD-ROM is on one of the IDEs and the BIOS can't find it.

btw: if you plan to use the whole 60 gigs as one partition
i recommend NTFS rather than fat32

Definitely the plan. Thanks.