My system is having real problems booting correctly. No other help sites deal with what I've been experiencing for almost a year now. I hope someone here can help me. I have a system I built myself about 3 years ago, and it has been working fine (small bugs aside). However, about a year ago, apparently out of nowhere, I started having problems booting. I have an Athlon XP 3000+, 1 GB of RAM, and 5 HDDs. I've got them hooked up so that the first 2 drives (one being my system drive) are connected to the mobo's IDE slot. My other mobo IDE slot is for my 2 optical drives. HDDs # 3 and 4 are connected into the first slot of a Promise Ultra133 TX2 IDE Controller Card. My HDD 5 is connected by itseld to the 2nd slot on the controller card. That's the setup. Master/Slave settings are all correct - I've checked and double-checked many times. That being said, what I'm about to describe is hit and miss. Sometimes it's exactly as I wrote below, other times it will work almost fine, other times it will get halfway, require a restart, then work fine. Usually, it's this: When booting, just after running through the ammount of RAM I have, it sas the processor and then hangs. It hangs for about 5-7 minutes then finally will say "Detecting IDE drives...", but that will take another 5 minutes. Then it will detect my 2 HDDs plugged into the mobo and the 2 optical drives. The next screen is that of the Promise IDE Controller Card. It takes a few seconds, then detects my drives - only it won't detect all of them. After that, after detecting all my PCI Controller ports, it skips my first boot device, my DVD-ROM drive and boots Windows XP from my HDD#1, only it says "Error loading OS" and it's done, that's as far as it'll get. However, if I put my Windows XP disc into my DVD-ROM drive, I get the "Press any key to boot from CD...", I press nothing, then Windows boots up normally. The only problem it that I don't have all my HDDs available. So I will restart. This time, it goes normal speed as it detects my IDE drives, and all my HDDs on my Promise card get detected just fine. Yet if I don't have my Windows XP disc in the DVD-ROM drive, it'll say "Error loading OS". Now, I did the Windows Recovery Console, and I wrote a new Master Boot Record and a new Boot Sector, but it didn't do anything, I still have the same problem. So this morning, I backed up my system drive to another HDD, and decided to delete my partition and reformat. After doing so, I discover that it hasn't helped at all. I can't wait almost 10 minutes to detect my IDE drives, just for my controller card to not detect all my other HDDs, so when it hangs at "Detecting IDE drives...", I restart. I must have restarted literally 50 times this morning. All this after I reformatted. I finally got into Windows, reinstalled all my drivers and most important programs, but I found that one of my HDDs was not detected. It showed it was there, but it said 0GB of 0GB, and it had a generic name. It was the HDD that shares an IDE chain with my system drive into my mobo. I really wanted this drive, so I unplugged it and connected it with my HDD#5 as a slave on the 2nd slot of my Promise Controller Card. It still won't detect it, but now it doesn't even see anything there at all. I obviously have a lot of problems - I hope they all stem from one big problem that I've overlooked (I've already tried new IDE cables). I've had a lot of trouble finding any info about what my system is doing. I read that I could need to replace my BIOS battery? I know this is very long, but thank you very much to anyone that reads my plea and has an idea. (P.S. - My system also makes noises randomly as it's running, sounding like it's restarting - but it's not. It might make this "restarting" sound one every 3 minutes or so. It's very annoying and can't mean anything good.)
possibly the mobo, try replacing it, you can always return if not it, as for the noise, possibly a new power supply, not sure on that one
You could also have a failing or already failed hard drive this can cause the problems booting that you described.The noises you heard could be coming from that drive,I don't consider myself an expert so please treat this possible diagnosis as just that.I'm simply trying to give you some ideas,Maybe try disconnecting one drive at a time and see if the problem clears up.
i concur with boxwrench sounds as if one of your harddrives is on the way out. do you have smartdrive enabled in bios? try using just the o/s drive and see if that works ok. if it does ok several times add one disc at a time and try then several times before adding the next i've had this a few times now mostly with older drives but once with a BRAND NEW Maxtor
How big is your power supply (PSU)? Try unplugging the hard drives, one at a time, to see if you get a good boot. If you get to a point where it is still not booting properly with just the main OS connected, it may be your motherboard, or the main hard drive. Lots of trial and error.
Yeah, I singled out my system drive, so that it was the only drive plugged in, and i had the same problem. I originally figured it was a problem with the drive, but because there have been problems with other drives showing up in the BIOS, I was tending to assume it had to do with my mobo too.
ace62987, I had just about the same problem myself recently. Pretty much did the same as you in trying to solve my problem. Nothing worked until I cleared CMOS. Try it, might work for you too.
I'm gonna agree with Boxwrench too....sounds like a bum drive (maybe the system drive). Do you have an old junk drive laying around? Strip the pc down to bare minimum to boot. One HDD (one that is not currently in the machine) and one optical drive, 1 stick of memory, etc. You know the drill. See how quickly bios detects the drive. Random thought...how current is your bios? You built this 3 years ago. My guess is there is an update for the bios that may solve your problems too. Good luck. ~Rich
