ECS K7S5A not booting my hard drive

[M J]

I just got an ECS K7S5A to upgrade one of my systems. Got everything installed into the case, and I get a POST, it detects my hard drive, but when it goes to boot from it, it says...

Searching for boot record from IDE-0...OK

But then it doesn't do anything. It should starting booting the OS from there, but it just stops. The system doesn't freeze cause I can still do a soft-reboot by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del.

The HDD I have was in the old system and I just moved it from the old one to the new one. So there is data on the hard drive, and I have confirmed that it will boot on another system.

I suspected maybe some problem with Win2k on the HDD, so I botted to the Win2k CD, and ran a repair from there. It found my Win2k installation on the HDD, and continued with a repair. It accessed, and wrote data to the hard drive, so I know it can talk to it.

I tried booting from the Win2k CD, and not press any key so it would try to boot from the HDD... it it just sat there after the press any key to boot from CD timed out. So that didn't work either.

After this it still wouldn't work, I tried swapping cables. I tried a ATA-33 cable 40-conductor, and an ATA-66 cable 80-conductor. Neither had any affect on the problem.

The hard drive I was trying to use is an older Quantom Bigfoot 6.5 Gb. So I tried a newer one. I took an HDD out of an exiting working system, WD 15Gb ATA-66 HDD, and put it in, same problem, no change.

I played around with CMOS settings. I reset the CMOS settings to Optimum, and also played around changing all the settings in CMOS to see if I could get anything to work, nothing...

I double checked connections, jumper settings on the HDD, cable positions, etc...

I tried different configurations of Master, Slave, Primary, Master, etc...

I changed out the video card with a different one, but no change.

The system will boot off of an old 4x CD-ROM into Win2k Setup, but it won't boot from a HDD. It finds the boot record on the Hard Drive, but it won't continue the boot process.

I haven't ever seen this happen before on a system, so I thought I'd try the community to see if anyone had any suggestions.

A good friend of mine US Tech Patriot, has used the same system specs as I have building several systems, and hasn't had any problems with this motherboard model, and all I see are good reviews in the user reviews. I'm wondering if I got a bad one or something.

I ordered everything from NewEgg last week.

Specs:
Enlight w/300 watt power supply. AMD aproved power supply.
ECS K7S5A w/LAN
Duron 1Ghz Retail chip
Leadtek Xtasy Gefore2 GTS-V 32MB
Quantum Bigfoot 6.5 Gb HDD (Primary Master)
OLD 4x CD-ROM (Secondary Master)


Other componets I tested in the system to no avail:
Western Digital 15 Gb ATA-66 HDD (Primary Master)
Asus V7100 Deluxe Gefore2 MX

I've been very thourough testing everything I can possibly imagine. Anyone have any suggestions to what this may be?

Oh, I also checked the BIOS version, and my board had the latest BIOS version from 2/6/2002

Matt Johnson

[neodave]

I apologize if you'd mentioned this, but is the first boot device set to HDD-0 in the Bios?

[M J]

I have tried setting IDE-0 as the first boot device, which is default, and also tried setting it as the third boot device, after it tried the floppy and CD-ROM.

So in both positions nothing changed, same problem.

[neodave]

I take it you want to keep any info you may have on this HDD. I'm lazy and rarely have anything on my computer I care that much about. I'd F-disk and reload. I know it's a drastic solution, but like I said I'm lazy and impatient.

Good Luck

Sounds like a corrupted boot record.

[M J]

Yes I'd like to keep all the info, and programs that are on the existing drive. It takes quite a while to reinstall everything and I just reformatted everything a couple months ago, the OS is very clean and running stable.

I did run the Emergency Repair from the Windows 2000 Setup CD, which I asume would have repaired the Master Boot Record that is on the HDD, cause that's what its suposed to do.

I did a little more research, and found only ONE other case where someone else has had the same problem. He had an extra blank hard drive, and he put it in, and installed everything from scratch to it, and he said it worked fine. I would like to avoid this process if at all possible.

I don't see why it wouldn't work just with a HDD with data already on it, it boots on other boards.

[M J]

Ok, get this... I got another hard drive... this one had Win98SE already installed on it. I put it in the system and everything works just perfectly.

I wonder why it doesn't like existing Win2k hard drives. You think because there is such a major hardware change it won't work?

I did change the motherboard, chipset, CPU manufacturer, video card, sound card, and NIC. :-)

[Peter M]

Problem is that if the old system used a different cyl/hd/sec mapping scheme than does the new one, exactly what you describe will happen. MBR will be identified and loaded, but the OS boot code in there can't retrieve the OS kernel off the drive and hangs.

Visit the old board's BIOS and see what the settings were like, and copy that on the new one.

regards, Peter

[bertbell]

Quote:

I wonder why it doesn't like existing Win2k hard drives. You think because there is such a major hardware change it won't work?

With Win NT and 2000, I've been able to move from Intel chipsets to VIA chipsets and still get IDE drives to boot. Going the other way (VIA to Intel) would not work even after following Peter M's advise about drive geometry (Really try this first).

After a drive transplant, my chipset/IDE problems have shown up as a BSOD.

Good Luck

[M J]

I'm going to double check the drive geometry settings, but since I was able to read/write to the hard drive during a Windows 2000 Emergency Recovery, wouldn't that mean that the drive geometry is correct.

When I ran the Win2k Recovery from the Setup CD, it located my Win2k installation at c:\winnt\ and performed a repair like its suposed to, accessed the hard drive quite a bit during the repair.

[U.S.TechPatriot]

Peter M!

Good idea! It is either that or just a messed up motherboard.
Of course I would try to do a fresh install before sending the MB back